The Sculptor Who Was Told to Paint

In 1508, Michelangelo Buonarroti received a commission he did not want. Pope Julius II ordered him to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — and Michelangelo was furious. He was a sculptor. Marble was his language. He believed his rivals had engineered the assignment to humiliate him, to watch a master of stone fail on a flat surface he had never been trained to conquer.

For four years, he worked in physical agony — neck craned upward, paint dripping into his eyes, his body so contorted that he later wrote a poem describing the misery. He complained constantly. He begged to quit.

And he created one of the greatest works of art in human history.

Sometimes the assignment God gives us looks nothing like the life we planned. We feel unqualified, mismatched, certain that someone has made an error in the heavenly paperwork. We are sculptors being told to paint. Yet the Almighty who formed us knows capacities in us that we have not yet discovered. The Apostle Paul reminded the Ephesians that we are God's workmanship — His poiema, His poem — created in Christ Jesus for good works that He prepared in advance for us to do.

Michelangelo walked into the Sistine Chapel a reluctant painter. He walked out having revealed the glory of creation itself on a plastered ceiling.

Your purpose may not look like your plan. Trust the One who assigned it.