G - A - F - (octave lower) F - C

G - A - F - [octave lower] F - C ... G - A - F - [octave lower] - F - C ... G - A - F - [octave lower] F - C.

For Roy Neary [played by Richard Dreyfuss] in Close Encounters of the Third Kind those notes just kept playing like a bad song [think It's a Small World After All when leaving Disney World] over and over in his head. He couldn't shake it. It became his destiny ... it was both a mystical and maddening experience. His journey cost him everything -- it caused him his job, alienated him from his family, and drove him to the brink of losing his mind. He was haunted by a vision that he could not bring into focus. There was no shortage of clues, in fact, they were everywhere; but he just could not seem to make sense of any of them.

Clearly he was being called. He had been chosen. Five notes riddled with meaning in what seemed to be a cosmic game of Name That Tune. There was somewhere he was supposed to go, something he was supposed to do. He just didn't know what it was. But to ignore it was not an option.

I remember being a senior in high school in the fall of 1977 when I first saw the movie. It haunted me then and it still haunts me today. Thinking we are not alone. What would I do if I were in Roy's position? How much would I be willing to sacrifice to follow my destiny? I can't remember how many times I have seen this movie in the intervening 34 years [there have been several] but I do remember the last time. I had almost finished reading a book called Brokenness: The Heart God Revives by Nancy Leigh DeMoss and had just completed the chapter highlighting the personality differences between a proud person and a broken person. Sadly, I had seen myself on the prideful side at almost every turn. Yet, ironically, I had even become proud that there were at least a few prideful traits that I didn't seem to struggle with.

It didn't get much worse than the condition of my soul that fateful day of June 22, 2003. After abusing my family [Janna for burning the bagels and the kids for not being ready for church] that morning, I had rushed back to our home under construction following a church pot luck to finish my videotaping of the in-wall wiring. It was then that I truly started my pathway to brokenness as 1300 lbs of drywall came crashing down on my left leg crushing my ankle [80+ fractures] and virtually severing my foot off [it lay dangling upside down six inches lateral to my lower leg]. There is a very long story that summarizes just how God used that experience that I will post after this for those who are interested.

Following two surgeries [and a true miracle of restoration] I was discharged from the hospital the following Friday [five days later]. That night we rented Close Encounters for the last time [not that I'll never see it again]. I saw it with quite different eyes that time ... the eyes of one who had been broken before the Lord. He obviously was using this experience for His glory ... it was my job to discover how and to be obedient to what He asked of me ... even if it didn't make sense at the time. Part of that obedience included writing the testimony that follows that I entitled My Miracle of Brokenness. I have no doubt the Lord inspired me to write it ... because whenever He inspires me to write, He wakes me up from a dead sleep and I can't stop typing until it is finished. This time was no different. But how this would be used ended up being very different.

I thought I wrote this just as a testimony to the patients I would see in the office who would ask "What happened to you?" and somehow I was supposed to tell them of my miracle and also deal with whatever issues they were seeking care for in a fifteen minute appointment. There was simply no way that would work. So I had 500 copies of the story printed at Kinko's to have my nurse hand out when she checked the patient in and thinking they'd likely have time to read it before I came in and they could just ask questions. Nevertheless, I had failed to realize that my employer would have a problem with this. My boss asked me to stop giving these out after just a week ... probably no more than 115 or so had been given. I was disappointed ... but in God's economy the seed was sown. I began to get e-mails from all over the country and eventually all over the world from people who had read my testimony and had been "laying on that floor in pain" with me in some very different experience in their lives. They had all been broken. Patients would photocopy the story and share them with their friends. It would be scanned into people's computers and then the files would be forwarded by e-mail to their friends and then their friends and then their friends.

Someone took it down to a major Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Orlando the next week and started giving it out to people attending that conference. It got so widespread that one of the speakers preached on it during the fourth day of the convention. Everyone left the convention with a copy. A few weeks later, my college alma mater, Oral Roberts University, called and wanted to include it in their alumni magazine which I consented to. The testimonies pouring in were incredible. God was doing amazing things in the lives of so many people [all because I was stupid enough to move the sheetrock].

And strangers would come up to me all over town and ask ... "Are you a doctor? Did you have sheetrock fall on your leg?" Then when I said yes, they would start weeping and break into stories of what God had done in their lives when they heard my story. One lady came up to me [Janna was with me this time] at Lowe's when we were selecting a front door for our home and asked "Are you a doctor? Did you have sheetrock fall on your leg?" [is this what happens when one is on crutches???] and then began weeping, saying God had healed her of terminal breast cancer as she read my story. She had been there on that floor. She had failed surgery, radiation and two different courses of chemotherapy and had recently been put in hospice as there was nothing else that could be done. She was beside herself with joy as she told about returning to her oncologist telling him that she had been healed. Of course, he thought she was crazy but surprisingly he indulged her request to be rescanned. Amazingly all her tumors were gone ... from the chest wall and axilla, from the lungs and the brain. He had no explanation. Our God is an incredible God who does what He wills. And somehow He chooses to use us. We just have to be available ... to follow our destinies.

All of us are called to places we have not known. Our lives were always intended to be journeys into the unknown. The invitation is both personal and mystical. No one else may fully understand what we have been called to. We ourselves may not even fully understand. The paths we must walk may appear to others as strange and unreasonable, but we know there is more going on than meets the eye.

When I began my search for God in earnest as a freshman at Oklahoma State University, He opened my eyes, my mind, my imagination to a future I never could have dreamed of. I began to see what life could be if I would read the signs and choose this great quest. God calls us out of the lives we have known and calls us to lives that we could have never imagined.

The signs are all around us, but even more, the signs are all within us. Our souls are being pulled forward. We are being called to a God whose voice our ears have likely never heard. We are having visions of a life we could not possibly create alone. We are to no longer be satisfied with where we are, but to join a quest for where we do not know. We will never be satisfied with less.