Gold, Fire, and Watermark Moments

The Creator speaks first. All other voices are secondary. Therefore, it is essential that we listen to Him. Otherwise, we run the risk of listening to an imposter who will flip our narrative in their favor and defraud us of our lives.

His voice is a dynamic one. When He says, “Let there be stars,” it is not a one-off event. Having been created, the stars are in motion, exercising their energies, displaying their beauty, and declaring the wisdom of their maker. They are silent, yet they saturate the heavens with their voice.¹

How, then, can we discover that first word? How can we get in touch with what the Creator has spoken?

When He says, “Let there be you,” He saturates this thought throughout your life. It is not a one-and-done, as if He were a watchmaker winding you up for an eighty-year run till you expire. The Creator, whose essence is love, light, and a consuming fire, is fully invested in your discovery process.

Why is He so invested in your discovery process? Because it is your nature to create, comprehend, and communicate just like the One who made you. In other words, you bear His image. Therefore, when He says, “Let there be you,” He sets in motion a dynamic that lives within the joys and sorrows of your life, a consistent “through-line” or recurring theme regardless of circumstances, declaring, “This is who you are, and this is what you are designed to do.” 

The old-fashioned word for this living dynamic is energeia², an Ancient Greek term which at times is clumsily translated as “operations” or “workings,” but is better transliterated as “energies” or “energizings.” With this in mind, we turn to one way the Creator communicates: through energizing the experiences of our lives. It is not the only way He communicates, and it is not the ultimate way He speaks, but it is a way. He energizes an event, an object, a word spoken, and so on, thereby imparting to us His original thought concerning who we are and what we are to do. The Creator converts created matter and real-time events into spaces He holds for us. Spaces where He speaks. Space where (though it might take time to dawn on us) we are held.

Therefore, we can ask this question: What events, objects, and words seem to be energized by the communication of the Creator concerning who we are?

Freely Given Gold

Let us first turn to those things in our lives which are obvious, self-evident gains, where little pain or sorrow were involved. We shall call these “freely given gold.”  Here are some personal examples.

When I was alone after bicycling home from elementary school, I found that Ultraman was not on Channel 39 as I had expected, but instead an evangelist preaching the Good News. He invited the listener to pray with him, and I did so, on my knees, on the kitschy green shag carpet of our den. (It was the early 70s, so you won’t judge my parents’ taste.) As I prayed, two large, warm hands covered my head. I did not see the hands, but I felt them as truly as I would have felt any natural, fatherly, human hands. If someone else had told me this, I would have doubted, but because it happened to me, I know it is true. I was there, after all.

Something or someone filled me through the laying on of those hands. In my grade-school mind, I said, “It feels like I’m a birthday party balloon! I’m being filled with helium!” And I collapsed onto—or one might more accurately say, into—the kitschy green 1970s shag rug.

This experience is freely given gold.

Likewise, I ask you: What uncopyable, irreproducible, uniquely individuated experiences have happened to you which continue to speak?

The Commonplace is the Hiding Place 

The experience need not be as dramatic as the one I have described. Most are mine much less dramatic. For example, my dad decorated my bedroom with the flags of the nations that were left over from a sales and marketing campaign at work (Mobil Oil), which had an international theme. My grandmother gave me a globe when I was four. These small, simple moments became living symbols to me, as did the book I read by Richard Halliburton³ describing his adventures in the nations. And they all carried the same through-line: “Your life will intersect with nations.” And it has. Collectively, I have spent twenty years in forty nations.

Gold Refined in the Fire

I have described positive experiences, but there is an equal number—perhaps more—that are sorrowful, grievous, and painful. Nevertheless, in those experiences, there are consistent themes that are takeaways. Likewise with you. However, because they are embedded in suffering, we must discern and extract them from these experiences. This is why we shall call them “gold refined in the fire.”

Let me illustrate symbolically through a true story. When my friend’s father’s house burned down in Shreveport, Louisiana, the flames consumed everything in it that could burn. His dad was an oil man of great wealth who had collected gold coins and classic firearms. As he waded through the charred remains of his home, he found that the guns had melted into hardened pools of slag. But the gold coins—though losing their original symbols and titles—had melted into nuggets. The man discarded the slag but gathered the gold.

Let the symbolism of that true story speak to you in your own suffering. Where is the gold you can gather from the fire? Here are personal examples.

My mother died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism while I was living in another city. I had no chance to say farewell. But when I returned home after the funeral, there was a letter from her in my mailbox. She had mailed it to me, then that night had died. The letter was filled with encouragement and blessing over my young family. (It had been her lifelong habit to encourage me with such cards and notes.)

Have you not had a similar experience? Reflect a moment.

Or take this example from the realm of cloak and dagger known as the corporate world: When I served at a well-endowed university on the Arab Gulf (a.k.a., Persian Gulf), I received top performance ratings for my teaching methods and motivated students. But shortly after those ratings were filed with my department head, she fired me in a way that completely blocked access for any form of appeal. My colleagues ascribed it to my naïveté about office politics; in my effort to live a transparent life before them, I had made fatal errors. Yet it was at this university that I made a friend in another department, an anthropologist who suggested to me a book that has profoundly shaped my life, a book I read and quote to this day.⁴

Again I ask, have you not had a similar experience? Reflect a moment.

The Watermark in Your Life

This collection of experiences—freely given gold and gold refined in the fire—constitutes the things in your life forming a sign unique to your life only. They are an authenticator that you have lived your own story and not that of another. In the parlance of papermaking, this is equivalent to the watermark, that symbol or emblem embedded in the fiber of currency or a composition guaranteeing its authenticity and guarding against counterfeit. It is the sign of true identity.

Let us therefore recollect matters day to day and season to season attentive to the watermark they collectively communicate. Let us gather the gold and let no sorrow be wasted.

To be sure, most of our lives is very much like the life of another, for we are human, and the vast majority of matters are either beyond our control or commonplace to normal life. But consider again what we pondered at first, how the stars saturate the sky. Now, in outer space there are vast empty quarters, and yet it is not the emptiness we notice, but the stars that fill it. It is the same with the energizing thoughts of your Creator toward you.⁵

There is, therefore, a watermark to discern that is yours alone and no one else’s, the original signature of your Creator written into your life with an inexorable fluency no amount of good or evil can erase. For His energizing word has resurrection force laced clear through it, such that it is lively enough to speak just as clearly in the darkness of your worst experiences as it is on your mountaintops. Nothing intimidates Him from getting His point across: you are an authentic, unique image bearer. His watermark declares it so.

And though the discovery process require years in the making—for it likely shall—let us seek until we find what He has indelibly formed into the flimsy, fragile fabric of our lives. Then we shall take heart. Then we shall discover courage for our calling.

© Kurt Mähler

To explore this more, receive the free discovery tool Recollect Watermark Moments along with a brief video when you subscribe to Kurt’s newsletter  Courage for Your Calling, where he equips you to live a life of intentionality in ways both hemispheres of your brain are wired for: practical steps and symbolic stories.

1. See Psalm 19. ↩︎
2. ἐνέργεια ↩︎
3. Seven League Boots, by Richard Halliburton. Published in 1935 by the Bobbs‑Merrill Company. I found it in a collection of books from my grandfather and great grandfather. ↩︎
4.  The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Condition, Methods, by A.D. Sertillanges. The book is about how to cultivate a calling. Most of it applies to anyone, not just those aspiring to be thought leaders. First published in 1921, the most recent English editions of this French work are a 1959 hardcover edition from Newman Press and a 1987 paperback edition from Catholic University of America Press. ↩︎
5. See Psalm 139. ↩︎