Follow the White Rabbit – Part I

In the theme of the Matrix, the legendary movie utterly exhausted in the early 2000’s by every pastor in America, I would like to share with you my favorite part of the whole movie. I admit, I have definitely had my fair share of overusing the Matrix like Thanksgiving turkey meat, but one of the pinnacle moments for me is when Neo is told to follow the white rabbit. Trinity takes control of his computer screen, and invites him to follow the white rabbit that comes in the form of a tattoo on one his clients that shows up at his door. This invitation is to leave behind the suffocating identity of Thomas A. Anderson to fully become his “secret identity”.

Mr. Anderson was a normal guy in the day; working a 9-5 in a cubicle. But when he was alone at night, he was the infamous hacker…Neo. He only really lived out of passion when no one was there. The only way to break free of being something he hated, from being Mr. Anderson, was to be willing to follow the white rabbit. He was going to have to go down a different pathway to experience the fullness of everything that was placed inside of him.

It is no different for you. One of the things I have seen plenty of, is an immeasurable amount of people not flourishing because they are doing things they are not gifted to do. Even some things they don’t like doing… at all! Their time is spent traveling a road they have been told to take, have seen done before, or never even dreamed to think that they have another option.

People go and they take a job and they do the job, but they don’t have a passion or talent for it. It’s a job that they see will bring them a decent paycheck, health benefits, and a good retirement package. I am not saying that these things are bad, but life and work are more than just those things. We live in a time where people work longer hours but are less fulfilled than ever before. That is a problem! How can we be a people that have progressed in so many areas of society, but yet we are still unfulfilled.

I am passionate about helping people discover what they love and I will argue that God is too. In fact, we spend most time trying to find purpose, like we are searching for Carmen Sandiego, but I believe that is a mistake. What if we stop looking for purpose and instead started discovering our gifts? We all have natural gifts that our creator has endowed us with and passions that go along with them. We should divert our search from an outward calling to identify and cultivate our gifts and passions.

It is not about being a rebel to do something different, it is about paying attention to what is going off inside of your heart. There are parts to life that we do not like doing that must be done, this is not what I am talking about. I am talking about building an entire career around safety and security rather than about taking the talent God has given you and going out and making more. We bury our gifted treasures in the ground and in the name of safety, we never carry out the mission God created us as individuals to partake in.

Do you have a desire to be a sub contractor or artist, or maybe something you have never seen done before? Are you afraid to do it because you might not make it? Yes money is important, but we end up not leaving jobs we have no business doing, and wasting our lives and never trying to do something with our Master’s talents he has trusted us with.

The Bible gives some really great examples about people being tremendous stewards of their gifts and bringing glory to God through that. Proverbs 18:16 “A man’s gift makes room for him and brings him before the great.” If we as the body of Christ want to be influential in our cultures, we must begin to make use of our gifts and we must begin to become skilled artisans in our crafts.

The picture is bigger than the individual; it is the church not the individual, the company called to make an impact in society for accomplishing a mission it refuses to let slip away and the family determined to do what they feel God is calling them to, even if everything around them does not seem to be in support. At the church I Pastor, we have a deep desire to launch culture creators into the world. The mark of our church is how we are cultivating and building value to our city, not just spiritually but economically, from an innovation standpoint, creatively and politically. To do this we must be willing to dig deep and find our gifts and go give them to the world.