There are no carbon copies in God’s family. Each one of us is a unique, unrepeatable miracle of God. .
Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is her moving and beautiful autobiography. She talks about growing up in the South, and the uniqueness of the unrepeatable miracle of God that each one of us is.
Early in the book she talks about the simple faith of her grandmother in which she was nurtured, and from which, I believe, came her triumphant sense of being unique, special, and of great value. During the cotton-picking season, though she never used an alarm clock, her grandmother would get out of bed at 4 o’clock. Maya says that she would “creep down to her knees and chant in a sleep-filled voice, ‘Our Father, thank you for letting me see this new day. Thank you that you didn’t allow the bed I lay on last night to be my cooling board, nor my blanket to be my winding sheet. Guide my feet this day along the straight and narrow, and help me to put a bridle on my tongue. Bless this house, and everybody in it. Thank you in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.’ Before she had quite arisen, she would call the names of all the children and issue the orders for the day. Each of them given the task that they were capable and gifted to perform.
Stay with this truth for a few minute. Each one of us is a unique, unrepeatable miracle of God. There are no carbon copies in God’s family. To be faithful to who we are, we must have a sense of, and claim, our uniqueness. But there is more. We must have a sense of our usefulness.
Let the words settle solidly in your mind: unique…useful. Antonio Stradivari had a sense of uniqueness and a sense of usefulness in relation to God. He boldly makes the claim.
“When any Master holds ‘twix chin and hand a violin of mine, he will be glad that Stradivari lived, made violins, and made them of the best….…For while God gives them skill, I give them instruments to play upon. God could not make Antonio Stradivari’s violins Without Antonio.”
“But that’s Stradivari, exceptionally gifted,” you may say or think. Suggested by your thoughts is the implication that you are not gifted, and therefore, how can you be useful? Such thinking is not only a betrayal of yourself, but a betrayal of your Creator. God takes for granted that each of us has something that is useful to Him, and our usefulness is not measured by the character or the capacity of our gifts, but by our willingness to use those gifts. All of us are gifted in some way, and none of us is beyond God’s desire to use us.