God Uses Whom He Chooses

After a gig one day, I accompanied a few of the other musicians to a party one of them was having at his house. There, I met up with some people I’d been privileged to share a stage with some years before. Some of them, in the meantime, had become quite famous. (Actually, some of them had already been famous before I met them.)

One of those people, whom I’d met at a Christian camp a few decades ago, I remembered myself to—or, at any rate, tried to.

“I don’t remember you,” he answered candidly. “But don’t leave. If you keep talking, I may.”

“That’s okay,” I shrugged. “I don’t blame you,” then quickly added, “for not remembering me, I mean. After all,” I admitted, “I’ve never even cut an album. I’m just…me.” Then I asked him to sign my guitar.

When he saw the guitar, he asked me, “Say, didn’t I meet you onstage at Forest Home?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Didn’t I just tell you that?”

“Maybe you did,” he mused. “I didn’t remember until I saw the guitar.”

What had happened, as best I remember, is that he and I both had Ovation guitars. Mine is a straight acoustic twelve-string; his was a cut-away electric six-string. “I don’t really need this fancy guitar,” he’d said. “I could work just as well with a plain one as with this.”

Anyway, he never did sign my guitar—and neither did anybody else, although I asked several to. I’ve told myself that I could never be “star-struck” because I don’t admire people the way some “Oscars Watchers” do. That, I’ve told myself, is because they’re just people: richer, luckier people than you (meaning me).
What he said to me then has stuck with me, and proven me wrong about what I always told myself. The truth is that I was star-struck. If I hadn’t been, I would never have asked all those guys to sign my guitar. Moreover, what he said was worth any ten signatures on my guitar.

He said, “Mike, everyone here is a ‘just me’! Do you think that I woke up one morning and told myself, ‘I think I’ll grow up to be a Christian rock star’? No, I didn’t! I just sang and played at a few places and people kept asking me to sing or play someplace else. I got lucky. Lots of people here have gotten lucky! That doesn’t make us better than you!” Then, I guess because maybe I still looked unconvinced, he added: “God uses whom He chooses. Just make yourself available to Him. If He wants to use your talent in a special way, let Him. If He doesn’t, it’s not your fault and it doesn’t mean that you’re not just as good as somebody else whom He did choose.”

I guess I must have stood there with my mouth hanging open because he reached over and closed it for me. “You’ll catch a fly,” he teased. Then he walked away without signing my guitar.

Hmmm. "God Uses Whom He Chooses".... Sounds like a good name for a song...!