When I was a kid my dream car was a Ferrari F40, but a black Porsche 911 turbo would be a respectable sports car for a family-man with a good career—maybe as a genius creative director at an ad-agency. I loved J-Crew, Polo, and million-dollar houses in the parade of homes. It was extremely important to do things and own things that reflected, what I knew to be, superb taste. But if I couldn’t own the thing that expressed my taste I would find occasions to express my approval of those items so others wouldn’t misjudge my taste. The display of good taste, to me, meant you were the right kind of people—you were smart, strong, dedicated, and fun. You were a winner, and you cared about quality. The first car I actually bought was a gold 1987 Porsche 944. It was a salvage-title, but it was a good buy at six-thousand dollars in 1998, not actually a choice for an eighteen-year-old-kid. It was more like getting struck by lightning. Gold wasn’t my preference in theory, but in person it was pretty persuasive. It did a good job of helping me to express the truth of my “superb taste.” I decided it was more mature than red anyway. My boss at the painting company was worried customers would think we were over-priced. They did. I remember this one lady was worried her son would drop out of college and become a painter instead of a lawyer like his father. She kept checking to see if I was done painting so I could leave before he got home from school and saw my car. They were stuffy—mental note, “lawyers don’t have fun,” a belief that would later be challenged by Matthew Mcconaughey in A Time To Kill and Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich. I mean, they made being a lawyer look cool so maybe I could too. But what I really wanted to do was get into film. I thought maybe I could really make it big, and I figured it was worth checking into. So I did it. Yeah, forty-year-olds did cool stuff as kids too. I lived down the street from NBC studio where the tonight show was filmed. I interned for Satellite Films off of Irvine, across the parking lot from the Capitol Records building. I got to see behind the scenes, meet famous people, and make connections. And I found out that being successful in Hollywood and having a healthy family was a pretty tall order. Maybe not impossible, but probably impossible for me. So as a junior in college I started to give up the thing that my excellent taste would have dictated for the thing that the spirit inside of me seemed to be pulling me toward. I turned down two job’s in Hollywood. I turned down the guy at the special effects company (they specialized in explosions, wow, total dream job) and the owner of an art direction company I worked with on the set for MTV. The jobs were nothing fancy, but nonetheless, they were open doors. Fast-forward to twenty-two years later. I’m married (I love you Kelsey). I have a dad-bod (okay that's my fault). I have six kids with number seven on the way. I’m a registered nurse. Our family vehicle is a fifteen passenger van. We’re living in my grandma’s old house, and I feel extremely blessed. What happened? Did I completely lose my sense of style? Am I a loser? Did I just lower my expectations to meet my low performance? Let me make one thing clear; I’m not saying a fifteen passenger van is inherently christian. But I am saying that what I thought I wanted and what I actually wanted were two different things, and it isn’t because my taste changed. I still really prefer Ferraris and Porsches to the van and fancy houses over my grandma's old house. But somewhere along the way I learned that what people have and do might be an expression of their taste or performance, but it might just be an expression of obedience, sacrifice, and faith. That realization was convicting. Could it be that people I had judged as boring, strange or even dumb were actually daring, passionate, and wise? What we have and do says much about our values, but being able to have the best of both worlds is a mirage. Being your best you will involve giving yourself up and allowing Christ to shape you.
Luke 9:24 “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”
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