Lots of people are familiar with my story about the sock monkey as a child and how I believed that was God. Many of you have seen my videos I have done about a sock monkey or even seen the one that a dear friend of mine gave me after hearing my story about the sock monkey. A few weeks ago another friend gave me a couple of more.

Yesterday as I was home I set them on the chair with the original. And I realized as I did there is so much more to image than I or many others have even begun to plumb.

As I looked at those three monkeys, I realized that my original beginning in the church was skewed. It felt like they wanted me to look like the church they believed in and what God looked like. And I rebelled in some areas because I didn’t want to be a clone.

I really believed, that I had an identity that was unique and designed for me. After I left that church I got caught up in my own thinking about what I might look like and what God wanted me to be. It did not stop the fact that I would cause others to look like something I believed in.

In an earlier life I built homes throughout southern Vermont and one of the things I learned was that my method of putting on shingles for instance was different than some of the other people that I worked with. What I found was sometimes their methods and manners were equal or even better than the methods I had learned. But it did not detract from who I are they were.

We both built homes.

There is something about image that many of us have failed to understand. God created us in His image but he gave each one of us His uniqueness for us. Just as I described the home building piece, my being equipped worked through me differently than my friend Rick being equipped, for instance.

The same is truth in the church.

I can equip somebody to prophesied or to give a word to another but that word or prophecy will come through their uniqueness. Their uniqueness will include culture, background and upbringing.

I look at the picture of the three monkeys that I set up. I look at the diversity. Clearly they all are sock monkeys but each one of them is different in their construct, color and design, just like people.

Yesterday I wrote “Be you because no one else does it better”. When you be you, I get to be me. When you do what God created you to do I get to do what God created me to do.

Today God has established great opportunity in the kingdom for you. That opportunity is preserved and has been made ready for you because of who He created you to be. How He created you to be. That opportunity may well never exist for anyone else because they don’t look like you or sound like you or do things the way you do.

Today is your day. Made for you just like God wanted it to be.