It’s amazing to think that we are, each of us, a God-created and eternal being with a tremendous power to affect change around the world… and that most of us don’t walk in that identity. Why, it would be like being a folk singer who recorded a couple of albums in the 1970s, then faded into obscurity and a life as a blue-collar laborer, then getting a phone call thirty years later informing you that not only had your albums had gone multi-platinum in South Africa and Australia and that you were hugely popular over there, but that you had inadvertently contributed to the eradication of apartheid, South Africa’s government-mandated racism.
But that could never happen, right?
Except, as you may have guessed given my oddly specific example, for the time it did.
The singer was a man named Sixto Rodriguez, who performed in and around Detroit, Michigan in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the name “Rodriguez.” A couple of record producers still coasting on the success of the Motown era heard him in a dingy club one day, were impressed with his raw folk sound and his highly political lyrics, and brought him in to their studio to make a record.
The album was called Cold Fact, and it was released in 1970 in the United States to little buzz. Practically no one bought it, and the same held true for Rodriguez’s follow-up album, Coming from Reality, released in the United States the following year. His music career going nowhere, Rodriguez essentially retired from the business and instead stepped into a life performing honest labor like painting houses.
As the story goes, at least according to the documentary Searching for Sugar Man tells it, of the few people who had purchased Cold Fact, one of them was an American woman who was then dating someone who lived in the nation of South Africa. She flew over to visit him and brought the album with her for whatever reason and wound up leaving it there. And like a virus introduced into a foreign population, the album found a welcome host and spread rapidly in popularity. So after the virus “took,” the album was officially released in South Africa around 1971 and wound up going platinum over there—which means it sold at least a million copies.
And Rodriguez had no idea.
He was a trailblazer and an unequivocal success as a musician and songwriter (however you wish to measure that “success;” I understand that is a nebulous term that has different meanings for different people), but he was completely unaware of that, instead scraping out a living with his hands in the decreasingly economically mobile Detroit. Instead of using his hands to make music, he was using them to paint houses or demolish them or whatever else needed to be done.
He was completely ignorant of the fact of who he really was. Who he could be.
Does Rodriguez remind you of someone? Has God placed gifts in you that He wants the whole world to see; yet you’re hiding out in your own version of Detroit?
What’s keeping you and this tremendous gift locked up?
For me, I was trapped inside a fear bubble for close to a decade. The fear of rejection made me…
–          afraid to put myself out there
–          afraid to embrace the gifts God had blessed me with
–          afraid of what others might think
–          afraid to fail
–          afraid to succeed
–          afraid to say something wrong
You see I had let the pain of my past dictate everything about me. I had made so many poor choices and suffered through the consequences I began to believe the lies of the enemy. Lies that told me I wasn’t good enough, that everyone thought I was a fraud, that I would never measure up to my father, that people just laughed at me behind my back. These perpetuated my fears and drove me to my own version of Detroit. Where I hid for a decade. It was dark, depressive and the only way I coped was by numbing away the pain day after day.
But 1000 days ago God overtook my heart and gave me a vision of who I really am. Through letters that my mother sent me while I was in treatment, I began to grasp the vision that God had not created me to live in a mindset of fear and oppression. That He hadn’t walked beside me, day after day, watching as I destroyed my body and mind only to let me pass without using my pain as a platform to change lives. You see, my life hasn’t always been good, but today I serve a God who has the power to make all things good. To turn my pain into my platform, to make my mess a message, to change my heart forever.
The good news today is that YOU have this same wonderful opportunity. Today you can choose to live in freedom and not in fear. One of my favorite passages in the Bible is found in 2 Corinthians 5:17. It reads: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
Today the new is here! Claim this victory. Embrace this hope that God is making all things new in your life and that He is working everything together for the good.
We can lose track of this hope because we let it get buried underneath a bunch of old stuff that used to define us. It can be covered over by layers and layers of lies, pain, hurt, and fear, until it is completely unrecognizable. Until we find ourselves, like Rodriguez, stuck in Detroit, our potential not fully recognized.
But we can’t let this happened anymore. We must claim the new creation, claim the hope, and claim the victory!