Fulfilling God's Will

Jose Antonio Ponce | 01/28/2025

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Eph 2:10

Fulfilling God’s Will

Sportscaster Bob Costas and his wife held a small dinner party where the guests were the great Stan Musial, his wife Lil and another baseball icon, Mickey Mantle. After the Musial’s had left, Mantle expressed his great admiration for Musial and confessed to Costas that he himself could have been that great.

“I could have been as good as Musial,” he said. “I should have been as good a player as Stan. Nobody had more power than me. Before I got hurt, nobody could run faster than me. But Stan was a better player than me because he’s a better man than me because he got everything out of what God gave him that he could, so he doesn’t have to live with all the regrets that I live with.”

I have lived this life. I think we all have, in one form or another. Many of us are still living it. At an early age, I discovered that I had a talent for creating music and writing poetry. My brother taught me how to play guitar and my sister taught me how to write poetry, but after that, I discovered that I was pretty good with a turn of phrase. (Thank you, mom for making sure that I mastered the English language.) As a not particularly attractive teenager, I used poetry and songs to get attention from girls and I had loads of platonic relationships because no teenage girl wants to be attached to a fat boy. And I think that’s where it turned.

Not content with best friend relationships, I began to seek attention from everyone, changing the way I dressed and spoke and acted, mimicking my hero, Bob Dylan and even trying to get everyone I knew to call me “Alias”, his character from a Kristofferson movie. I abandoned God because he had given me these talents and they were worthless in getting me the attention I wanted and believed I deserved.

I wasn’t alone. I watched people drifting as I was. They were going to college, getting married, having babies, joining the military and trying to find fulfillment without God. God was an obstacle, not the assistant we all wanted him to be. There were those people who broke free and became successful in their respective fields. Some became wealthy, or at least well off enough to do many of the things that they had dreamed of like travel, have a nice house or some sort of authority. Don’t get me wrong. These people worked hard to get to that place, but it seemed that money or prestige or title had become their God. After all, it had given them the things that God had not.

And then, later in life, I met the people who had truly used all that God had given them to be the best at who they were. Most, if not all were people who had not put God off until after achieving the things that they wanted. These were the people who recognized their talents early on and stayed the course. In my line of work, many are musicians and actors. Some are teachers, simple fathers and mothers, nurses, priests. My friend Nathan took his ability to draw cartoons and used it to create comic books that bring the story of Christ to people around the world. Realizing that many people cannot read, they learn about the Son of God and his sacrifice through illustrations.

All these people struggled financially at one time or another, experienced rejection and ridicule but persevered until they became respected in their fields, not as young people, but as wise and experienced middle-aged folks. My friend Jaime, was once paid for his performance with a tuna sandwich. Still, he soldiered on and makes his living as a songwriter and musician, traveling across the country and internationally. He and his wife are not wealthy, but they are happy. My friend Thom and his wife wrote, produced and edited their own films until they found work in Hollywood. The films they worked on together were not blockbusters, but they have provided a happy retirement. They raised two daughters who are wildly successful in their respective fields.

The people that I admire for their talent, whatever it may be, never gave up on the blessings that God bestowed upon them.

Consider Saint Paul. Born a Jew in the Roman city of Tarsus. On the eighth day, he was circumcised and received the Hebrew name Saul. At a young age, Saul began to study the Law of Moses in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, a member of the Sanhedrin a most respected Pharisee and Doctor of the Law. Saul embraced this law and after Jesus’ crucifixion, zealously devoted himself to persecuting Jesus’ followers. Even when his own teacher, Gamaliel, recommended the followers of Jesus be ignored, Saul could not hold himself back.

Saul sought and received a letter of permission from the high priest in Jerusalem to go beyond the city, searching from house to house to arrest those who followed Jesus, bringing them back in chains to stand trial in Jerusalem. He took this letter of permission with him on a journey to Damascus, where his conversion took place.

God had given Saul a zeal for the church. He had devoted his life to Jewish law and after his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, he was converted. Jesus corrected him, yet he did not abandon his zealous ways. Instead, he turned it into zeal for Christ. He would not be dissuaded. Over the next 30 years, he would be beaten, robbed, stoned, shipwrecked, betrayed by his friends and finally imprisoned and executed. The zeal God had given him as a young boy never left him. He used this gift that God had blessed him with to further the kingdom of God on earth, founding more than a dozen Christian communities and writing 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament.

I had never stopped writing or singing or telling stories, but I was always looking for that big hit, that bestseller, that lucrative deal. It wasn’t until I was 53 that I realized that if I just let go, that I might be able to do some good work, and I think that I have. My wife and I still struggle a bit, but she supports me in all I do and keeps me on track financially. That is her gift. God has blessed me with enough work perfectly in line with my talents to keep us afloat.

We all need to look at ourselves. God is generous. He gives each and every one of us something special. It might be compassion or patience or the ability to bring people together. I’ve only known one truly God blessed politician in my life, but he was exceptionally special and did exactly what he promised to, work for his constituents, not for himself. See? Even in the often corrupt world of politics can we find those people who were born to be true and compassionate advocates for all of us.

The famous musicians and writers and actors that I admire, I admire for the body of their work, sometimes decades long and when you look into their personal lives, they have all had happy marriages and have raised exceptional families should they have chosen to do so.

We need to use every bit of what God gives us because it will make a difference. It might not move mountains or bring riches, but it will make a difference in someone’s life and maybe in many someone’s lives. And best of all, it will make all the difference in our lives.

Pray that God moves you to where you need to be. To where people will be able to see God’s glory shine through you.

Prayer to Use God’s Gifts

Father,

You have blessed me

with talents and abilities that until now,

I have ignored

and used for personal gain

rather than for Your purpose

so that my brothers and sisters

might see Your glory in me

everything on earth reveals Your presence

our ability to reason