| Guest post by John Curtis |
God doesn’t give us the life we want, he gives us the opportunity to make the lives we have the courage to create.
God’s gifts rarely arrive as fully formed outcomes; instead, they show up as raw material: time, talents, relationships, and even obstacles that invite deliberate shaping. The real test is whether we recognize each circumstance as a creative medium rather than a fixed verdict. When we move from asking “Why isn’t life giving me what I ordered?” to “What can I build with what I have in front of me?” we shift from passive expectancy to active authorship. That mindset liberates us to treat constraints as design parameters, failures as data, and uncertainty as the open canvas on which possibility can appear.
Courage is the ignition point. It empowers us to risk reputation for growth, to iterate publicly, and to translate abstract convictions into concrete decisions. Each conscious choice (where to invest attention, which voices to heed, what battles to fight) compounds into a life that, in retrospect, looks intentional rather than accidental. Divine generosity is not reflected in perfect circumstances but in the continual availability of agency, and the gift of free will.
We owe it to our maker and the generations before us to continue to push and reshape. After all, the battle tested DNA we carry is simply borrowed from before. Seizing that agency daily is how gratitude becomes a strategy and faith becomes an engine for constructive action. In this way, our creative work becomes a bridge between divine responsibility and ancestral obligation, honoring both directions of legacy while carving out space for what has never existed before.
Photo by Earl Wilcox on Unsplash
Veni, Vidi, Scripsi 