A Blank Check

A decade ago when I attending graduate school at Stanford, I thought I'd take a requisite class in the legendary Stanford Business School.

By then, I had taken most of my classes from the Design School, the School of Education and the Human Computer Interaction Department and the interdisciplinary part of me couldn't resist crossing the street.

So I figured what better class to dip my big toe in but one called Creativity in Business. It was sufficiently benign and I figured inoculated from the competitive cut-throat energy that trade-marked the B-school.

It turned out that B-school students were equally intimidating whether they were taking Corporate Finance or they were taking a random class on Creativity. Fragile as I was then, overly-preoccupied with grades and too nervous to network even in my own department, I confronted a final project which was a presentation summarizing what I learned from the entire quarter.

So speaking in a currency ( no pun intended ) well versed by the whole, I brought in the object of a blank check.

" I am a blank check." I started. " After a lifetime of working my butt off to be worthy, to be good enough to be specifically a million dollars so people like you will take me seriously. I've decided today that I will be a blank check.

It's really scary to be one, because moment to moment, I am comparing myself to you, and guessing your net-worth. I am wondering if I am good enough. I am trying to find an opportunity to show you I am. To name drop, to impress you, to tell you that I am worth it.

But today God is challenging me to be blank check. He is telling me that if I can stay blank -- open hearted and humble, If I can let go of the net-worth I am SUPPOSED to be, He can fill in the check with an amount so much more." I told them about my free-lance designer days and how I would haggle with my clients over paying their invoices and negotiating bids, nickle-and-diming every cent. "It was so important to me that you knew I was worth $1million not a penny more and not a penny less.

But God is telling me that when I do that, that's all I'll ever be worth - a finite amount of arbitrary importance.

But if I am willing to be blank, to be open, to be humble and willing to turn my worth over to His hands -- I could be more than I ever dreamed or imagine. Perhaps even more than you."