The Real Truth about God

In my preparation to become a field superintendent in building construction…my chosen career…I spent a large portion of my early-to-middle twenties working in as many different building trades as I could…such as residential framing, finish carpentry, remodeling, residential drywall, commercial drywall, commercial lather on a 22-story high-rise in downtown Los Angeles, mason’s tender on the masonry block portion of the construction of a supermarket store, and laborer on a large department store in a shopping center in Homestead, Florida, for three months during my summer break in junior college.

From ages twenty-eight to thirty-one I broadened my experience by working three years in residential construction customer service for a large builder…first as a repair-person and then as head of the department.

I then furthered the advance preparation of “paying my dues”…of “learning my craft”…by working as an assistant superintendent for two and one-half years in production tract housing…before becoming a superintendent in my middle thirties…completing a bachelor’s degree in construction management at age 38 by attending night classes.

Because my goal from the beginning was to become a construction field superintendent…during these years as a tradesman, in customer service, and as an assistant superintendent…I took detailed notes and made rough sketches of what to do and what not to do as a jobsite superintendent…to be able to influence the work…at key milestone points…to run more smoothly and as error-free as possible.

These notes and sketches became the material for four books published by McGraw-Hill (1995-98)…on how to avoid problems, crashes, and collisions between the various building components…in housing construction…which I began writing and illustrating at age thirty in 1982.

This is not unlike many careers where people “work their way up from the bottom” in order to learn their craft…before moving up into a supervisory/leadership position.

I should disclose here that I became a Christian at age 18…and received a very clear and supernaturally confirmed calling two years later…to become a construction superintendent…which would take-up too much space here to describe adequately and in detail.

My personality is such that I would describe myself as being a rather slow and deliberate thinker. I usually need to “go once around the block” before I figure things out…in nearly everything in life. I am not an instantly “savvy” or “with-it” person by nature…needing first to experience or observe something in action before it clearly “sinks in.”

I would guess that this is true for many people.

The inspired approach of making an early investment of first-hand, varied building trades experience upfront…worked well for me…because when the time came to be a full superintendent in charge of my own projects…I had developed a good sense of how to proactively think-ahead to organize and schedule the work.

But equally important, I had also built-up over the years a personal database of close to two-thousand problems and issues to avoid…which if eliminated upfront through constructability analysis and by using detailed checklists sequenced to each successive phase of the work…removed these subtle debugging problems altogether before they had a chance to enter unnoticed by stealth into the construction…which otherwise would create the seemingly inescapable, repetitive daily syndrome of “putting-out-fires” that plagues the jobsite management of many new construction projects.

How this all relates to this book about the real truth about God…is that this approach of advance preparation toward a very specific and well-defined future goal…in my work career…also informs part of my understanding of the underlying purposes and intentions of God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…demonstrated in the biblical narrative stories of faith.

Most importantly…this informs a unique worldview having purpose, meaning, and hope for human life…that when understood in its novel, elevated, and unconventional aspects…turns out to be light-years ahead of any atheistic, naturalistic philosophy for life.

If our very short-length lives here are intended to be an experiential preparation for the upcoming reality of eternal life in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…this then turns upside-down all standardized priorities within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (Mt. 6:33).

It more accurately defines the true spirit of God-composed journeys of faith. It more accurately defines the essence of the Christian life.

Some of the most unconventional, non-worldly verses in the Bible…that describe the elevated outlook of the people engaged within their God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts…can be found in Hebrews 11:12-16:

12 Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable.

13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

14 For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.

15 And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned.

16 But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.

God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts are intended by God to create the context for the advance preparation of Spirit-born Christians to enter into the kingdom of Jesus Christ…now and in the heavenly world to come…by being part of the active solution of fixing specific and wide-ranging problems here in this world…sometimes solely and simply by becoming a better person “in Christ” right where we find ourselves…through the divine foresight, insight, and premeditated planning of God.

This is what I experienced in my divinely orchestrated apprenticeship in preparation to become a building construction superintendent…imperfectly performed by me at many points along the way…yet perfectly planned and managed by God in its conceptually insightful program…and in its uniquely innovative, final outcome.

Should the goal in life be to acquire material wealth, elevated social status, personal acclaim, and financial security…or should our goal be to walk within a journey of faith with God…allowing Him to reveal to us the talents and abilities He created within us…in unselfish service to other people and to the world-at-large…while leading us into the all truth of John 16:13 as preparation for eternal life in the upcoming kingdom of Jesus Christ?

The biblical stories of faith are not about elevating individual people upward into being the focus of praise and adulation…but instead focus upon achieving something…a particular positive goal or task…not lifting up someone.

The positive characters in the biblical narrative stories of faith focus upon achieving the tasks at hand…which in-the-moment are bigger than themselves…requiring God’s help.

The biblical narrative stories of faith tell us that God’s ways are higher than our ways.

The end-point goal that God is aiming for…as demonstrated in the biblical narrative stories of Abraham through Paul…is not the acquisition of material wealth, popular acclaim, and financial security (Mt. 6:19-34)…not even the pursuit of basic survival in a difficult world…if that is our bottom-line, minimum definition of success…but something entirely different.

The end-point goal of God is higher…to compose and bring into being specifically tight life-scripts designed to benefit mankind…to fulfill to the highest extent the innate potential of those people called by God into their unique tasks, from the viewpoint of eternity…and at the same time to reveal to these people of faith and to the world-at-large…the real truth about God.

I have several books published on how to avoid making costly mistakes in building construction…through proactive debugging…yet not everyone buys these books, reads them, and puts this concept of advance personal preparation from the bottom upward…into practice.

Yet this divinely crafted experience about how to best acquire the raw data through first-person basic field research…in this case specifically on how to best manage construction jobsites…informs me about the real truth about God…that if our worldview priorities match the outlook of Hebrews 11:12-16…and we are willing to give God the benefit-of-the-doubt regarding His leadership skills to the point of picking up our cross to follow Him…then God can plan-out a course in our careers, our personal lives, and our ministries to the larger world…that far exceeds anything that we can or would come-up with on our own.

Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead the third day…to restore our relationship with God…to clean us up in terms of a new spiritual re-birth that creates the capacity for us to hear God’s voice…and to walk within a journey of faith…precisely so that the kingdom of God within us can not only prepare us for a future in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…but also so that God…through us…can fix a small part of the world around us to the extent of the outreach of our capacity and influence.

This tells us something about the real truth about God…which could not have originated through human literary fiction.

This concept…this worldview…of “seeking a country”…of “desiring a better country, that is, a heavenly”…could only originate from the God of the Bible who has the loving and brilliantly insightful capacity to create individual apprenticeships designed to prepare us for a future eternity in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…starting now with our lives here.

If this concept of God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts as articulated in the biblical narrative stories of faith…beautifully summarized in Hebrews 11:12-16…that establishes and highlights the worldview that this life is a preparation for the upcoming life in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…to desire a better, heavenly country while living and participating in this current world…this then exposes the contrasting opposite worldview of going our own way (Isa. 53:6) as the worst possible misdirection to take.

If one of the main goals and purposes of this life is to discover the real truth about God (Gen. 3:1-5; Ps. 32:8; Jer. 33:3; 1 Jn. 2:17)…then going our own way in autonomous individualism…will not get us there.

Through my career path in building construction…I discovered the reality of a God-composed journey of faith life-script…in which God knew through foresight the precise end-point to aim for…and was able to open the right doors at the right times to create the opportunities…to reach a final destination that I could not have planned or orchestrated on my own…with anywhere near the success that God’s higher ways and thoughts for my life achieved.

This has real-world application to the question raised later in the book about the relevance of the biblical narrative stories of faith…to our modern lives today.

The concept that God can compose life-scripts for us to prepare us for an eternity in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…and that as our Creator God He is the only person who could possibly know in advance the final end-point this preparation should aim at…is in every sense of the words…timeless, brilliant, and modern.

This concept of the higher ways and thoughts of God applied in our lives through God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts…tailored specifically to every person who will follow God in faith…lies at the heart of the real truth about God.

Finally, God does not want to control…to over-manage…our lives. God created human beings with an incredible capacity for intellectual reasoning, moral judgment, and free-will choice.

The last thing God wants is for people to be like robots.

God simply has divine foresight…and resides at the top-most point on the vertical spectrum-line of absolute goodness and brilliant pure light.

God wants to joint-venture with us in a personal relationship. The half that God brings into the relationship is His divine attributes of perfect love and divinely timeless foresight.

If God can see 15 years into the future for a 21-year old young man just starting his career in building construction…to inspire and inaugurate a program of observing, recognizing, and recording construction problems as they occur…with the long-range goal to be able one day in the future to eliminate these problems proactively through the same quality of foreknowledge that God exhibits through divine foresight…demonstrated in the life-scripts in the biblical stories of faith…then God can do this for every imaginable career, calling, and life-plan “under the sun.”

God can insert the same divine quality of advance inspiration to the biochemist researcher looking for the cure for cancer…to the high school English teacher trying to find the best teaching method to inspire her students…to the defense attorney to find the best legal argument to acquit his innocent client…to the stay-at-home mom raising three children looking for the optimum approach to being at the top of her game as multi-tasker in-chief.

If God is this “savvy” and “with-it” to know about the unmined and untapped area of debugging building construction…to set-up a program for me to begin observing and recording this obscure information years before I would actually need it as a jobsite superintendent…then God is also current, proactive, and relevant for every other imaginable career and enterprise.

This is a small part…yet a well-defined insight…into the real truth about God.

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” (Heb. 13:8)

“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” (Jn. 10:10)

How has God moved in your life?

I hope this post was an inspiration, and encouragement, and a blessing to you.