Publisher : Thomas Nelson (June 1, 2021)
Paperback : 208 pages
Justin McRoberts dares you to move beyond “it is what it is”
thinking and become an agent of love and redemption in your household,
neighborhood, and workplace.
“It is what it is”—a common phrase you hear and maybe even say
yourself. But the truth is that there is not one square inch in the
whole domain of our human existence that simply is what it is. Justin
McRoberts invites you to embrace a new mindset: it is what you make of
it.
With warmth, wisdom, and humor, McRoberts shares key moments from his
twenty-plus years as an artist, church planter, pastor,
singer-songwriter, author, neighbor, and father, passing on lessons and
practices learned about making something good from what you’ve been
given rather than simply accepting things as they are.
Thought-provoking but actionable, It Is What You Make of It declares
that love doesn’t just win, mercy doesn’t just triumph, and light
doesn’t just cast out shadow. Rather, such renewal requires the work of
human hands and hearts committed to a vision of a world made right (or
at least a little better). When we partner with God in these endeavors,
we love the world well and honor the Creator in whose image we are made.
We will not be remembered for who our parents were or where we were
born or what our socioeconomic circumstances were. We won’t be
remembered for our natural talents and strengths or the opportunities we
were given or the challenges we faced. In the end, each of us will be
remembered for what we made with what we were given.
Purchase Links
Thomas Nelson | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
About Justin McRoberts
Justin McRoberts lives in the Oakland–San Francisco Bay Area with his
wife, Amy, and two children. He is the author of four books, including Prayer: 40 Days of Practice and May It Be So: 40 Days with the Lord’s Prayer. Justin’s sixteen albums and EPs have gained him a faithful audience among listeners nationwide since 1999.
Justin leans on his over twenty years in the arts and ministry to
mentor and coach artists and pastors in person as well as over video
calls. He is also the host of the podcast @ Sea with Justin McRoberts and
co-founding pastor of Shelter-Vineyard Church Community in Concord, CA.
Justin regularly travels to speak at churches and colleges, as well as
leads retreats for ministry staff, college students, and young adults.
Connect with Justin
Excerpt:
F IVE
Everybody Hurts, Everybody
Matters
In the fall of 2010, I started the largest
and most time- consuming and
energy-sucking creative project of my life
up to that point (and, God willing, ever). I didn’t know that when I started it. I just thought I’d throw together a few good ideas and have some
fun! Then, I’d invite a small team
of people to join with me, and the fun
would be multiplied to partylike status. Only, this party was three people working way too many hours for nowhere near enough money while I
disintegrated into the worst version
of myself anyone at the “party” could have imagined.
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IT IS WHAT YOU MAKE O F IT
Cue Richard Wagner–oriented party playlist.
The project
was a combination of letter
writing and essays and music and lyrics and visual art and documentary-style video and stress
and passive aggres-
sion and regular aggression and also
personal reflections on
relationships. Thematically, it was a celebration of community and a record of what my friends and family had made out of the circumstances and
relationships God had gifted us. Eventually released
in 2012 and called The CMYK Project, it turned out alright as a project.
Sadly, it cost me a dear friend along the way.
One of the final phases of The CMYK Project
involved the printing of a book.
Actually, that’s only partially true;
it was two books. Actually, that’s only partially
true as well; it was really the same book in
two formats. Somewhere in the process, we (and by “we” here, I mean “I”) decided on printing two versions of the same book; one version was just a
regular-ole book with text on paper. The other was a two-hundred- page, full-color extravaganza featuring artwork and photography and interviews (which
I didn’t mention
in the description above, just like I didn’t mention
it to my team when we were
working on it) along with letters and
essays. It’s probably also worth noting that
we released the music on three separate
EPs with three
different covers and then selected a few songs from each
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EvERYBO DY HURTS, EvERYBO
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of those EPs, rerecorded those songs, and tacked on even
more songs to create
a fourth musical aspect to the project—a full-length, full-band, studio-recorded album. So what we produced was . . .
a four-CD, twenty-five-song collection, a text-only book,
a full-color book,
three physical art
installations by different artists in different
cities,
video interviews with each of the visual artists, transcribed, printed versions of each of those inter-
views, and
the gradual,
tragic disintegration of every relationship.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know . . . It.
Was. A. Lot.
The real fun begins
with knowing that I’d never
done anything like that before. In fact, I’d never made a book before, which was probably the
most straight- forward part of the entire project.
To make that portion of the project simpler and easier on us
(and by “us” here, I mostly mean
“me”), my art director and I sub- mitted
the book-printing process to a large, reputable printing company. Having done what we thought was all the heavy lifting (writing,
designing, formatting, arguing,
walking away, and then returning
to the same
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IT IS WHAT YOU MAKE O F IT
argument . . . blah, blah, blah), all that was left was to upload
the book files; make the few, small adjustments we’d
probably need to make; and then dance victori- ously as the book (along with every other
aspect of the project) found
its way into the hands,
hearts, and minds
of readers .
Three days after the
first upload, we got a notifi- cation that there were things in need of fixing. Like
I said, we expected this, and while the list of correc- tions was quite a bit longer than we’d
anticipated, we happily fixed the book and uploaded
it again, thrilled
to be done with this massively too-big and costly, and also ridiculous to the point of being beyond description, project.
Three days after that, the printer responded a sec- ond time with a list of errors, several
of which we were certain
we’d fixed. So I called the printer’s customer ser- vice number
. . . and I wasn’t kind.
Not even a little bit. I was tired, and I felt that being tired somehow
excused me from being kind. After feeling
like I’d sufficiently communicated my frustration and disap- pointment, I hung up, and we dove into our third round
of edits and fixes.
Then there was a fourth,
and then a fifth,
and a sixth,
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EvERYBO DY HURTS, EvERYBO
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and eventually, the same two
things started happen-
ing every three to four days:
1. We received
the same set of twenty-five notifications and necessary
changes.
2.
I ended up on the phone with customer service.
Over and over and over
for weeks and weeks and weeks.
The only things that
seemed to change were my level of
frustration and the depth of insult I was there- fore prepared to dole out over the phone to the agent I spoke to.
This went on for twelve rounds.
Quick
math: twelve rounds times three business days
per
round (which means
we’re not counting
weekends) means six-plus
weeks, which, divided
by seven days per week, factoring relational stress and a dwindling supply
of bourbon = YIKES!!!
When that twelfth email came from the printer,
I stared at my computer screen blankly until my art director
spoke up. “I think I’ll call this time, okay?”
said Gary. “I’m not as angry as you are.”
I left to run a few errands while he
called the printer.
When I got back, Gary told me he’d worked
it all out. I wanted
to know if “working it all out” meant he’d
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IT IS WHAT YOU MAKE O F IT
murdered anyone. He said no, which was
slightly dis- appointing but probably for the best. What he meant by “working
it all out” was that he’d asked to speak with a supervisor, just as I had. And just as had happened when I’d
called, Gary was told they didn’t have supervisors. But
then, instead of losing his cool and insulting the person on the other end of the call (my strategy), Gary calmly
described our situation
and history in detail and kindly but firmly asked who he should be talking to.
“You need a specialist,” the agent told him.
In eleven previous calls,
I’d never even heard the word specialist much less been given the option to speak to one.
Gary
said he held the line and was connected to someone
we will call, for the purposes of this story,
“the Specialist.” Gary described
our situation, and the Specialist said she thought it was
“really odd.” Gary assured her he was aware of how odd it was and then asked what we needed to do. The Specialist asked Gary to upload the file again.
“With all due respect,”
Gary replied, “we’ve uploaded the file a dozen times now.”
“I can see that,” said
the Specialist. “This time, I’ll stay
on the phone with you and wait for it to hit our system. Then we can look at the file together.”
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EvERYBO DY HURTS, EvERYBO
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Ten minutes
later, Gary and the Specialist were looking at the file together.
“Is your file supposed
to be five-by-eight or six-by-nine?”
“It
should be six-by-nine.”
The Specialist paused and
then asked Gary if she could call him
back. Twenty minutes later, she called back and told Gary what was actually going on. It wasn’t that their system
had a glitch or that our file was corrupt or even that we were doing something
tech- nically wrong.
It was much worse and far weirder than any of that. During
one of the early phone calls in the editing
process, I’d said something pretty
horrible to one of the technicians. In turn, he’d reset the specs on our project
from six-by-nine (which
was correct) to five-by-eight, so that every
time we uploaded the file, it would
trigger dozens of warnings and be rejected. The technician had sabotaged our project. That’s a pretty horrible thing to do to someone.
But he did it because I’d been horrible
to
him.
Now here’s what’s really
funny (and by “funny” I mean
painfully ironic and related to my social inepti- tude): the full title of the CMYK Project—the book plus three EPs plus full-length LP plus visual
art plus video plus other
book—was CMYK: The Process
of Life
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IT IS WHAT YOU MAKE O F IT
Together and was promoted as “a celebration of
life in relationship.” It was chock-full of stories and anecdotes about getting along with and loving
other people, par- ticularly where
there were differences of opinion and experience. It was a project
about my own process of learning to love people
the way Jesus loved people.
So .
. .
Can you imagine being
the tech on the other
end of the phone, staring at
a chapter about the uncondi- tional
love of God while the author of that chapter calls you names? Perhaps you’d think the love and kindness described in those pages weren’t for you.
And if I’m honest, I certainly wasn’t offering them to that cus- tomer service agent, because in my mind
he wasn’t a person but an instrument.
I talked to him the way I talk to
the car that won’t start or the software that freezes. His value was entirely predicated on how useful and helpful he was to me.
My encounter with that
tech reminds me of one in the Gospel of Mark: the one about a woman whose body
was healed when she simply touched the clothes
Jesus was wearing. It’s a remarkable story in a lot of ways. First of all, that was quite an
ensemble Jesus had on, right? I’ve got a few favorite shirts,
but none of them have mystical healing
properties. More significantly (and less jokingly),
I am captivated by the choice Jesus
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EvERYBO DY HURTS, EvERYBO
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made to stop and talk with the woman who
touched “the hem of his garment” (Matthew
9:20). Because the way he handled the moment says far
less about the clothes
he had on or even his power to heal and far more about how important and valuable she was to him.
As the writer of Mark told it, a man named Jairus, whose
daughter was dying,
went to find Jesus to ask for help. Jesus was up to other things at the time, but he changed course
when Jairus asked
him to heal his daughter. That part makes sense to me. Jairus
led a syn- agogue, which made him a big deal in social, political, and religious circles.
Helping Jairus presented
a legit- imate opportunity to heighten Jesus’
profile, prove a few folks wrong, and “get the message out,” as it were. But as Jesus was following
Jairus back to his home,
the trajectory of the story changed.
And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had
suffered a great deal under the care
of many doctors and had spent all she
had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.
When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because
she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped
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IT IS WHAT YOU MAKE O F IT
and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.” (Mark 5:25–29)
Jesus then asked about
who touched him, which a few of his friends found a bit silly,
seeing as though there was a whole
mob of people jostling about and bumping
into one another. But to Jesus (and this is the part that gets me), this woman wasn’t just another per- son in the crowd. Which is why I
absolutely love the way the writer of Luke wrote about this
same story. As he retold it, when
Jesus asked about who touched him, she
tried to stay hidden but eventually conceded that “she could not go unnoticed” (Luke 8:47).
How good is that?
“She
could not go unnoticed.”
Jesus stopped,
and along with him, the whole crowd
that had been following him. I don’t know how long their conversation went on, because
none of the writers who captured this moment provided that
detail. But apparently it was long enough for Jesus to hear a lot of this woman’s story. She’d been sick
and bleeding for twelve years with
multiple medical failures along the way.
The other thing the story makes clear is that Jesus was invested enough in the conversation that someone else had to interrupt him and let him
know Jairus’s daughter had died.
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EvERYBO DY HURTS, EvERYBO
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Now, it’s significant that, once Jesus finally did arrive, he assured the people in Jairus’s household
that, despite appearances, he had things in hand and could still heal Jairus’s young daughter. That says to me that Jesus had enough confidence in his ability
to do the work he’d committed
to that he could pause for a moment along the way and turn his full attention
to a person he’d met so that “she didn’t go unnoticed.”
That
customer service agent wasn’t just another per- son along
the way, though I treated him like he was. Since the CMYK Project, I’ve learned
that . . .
the customer
service agent helping
me sort out font problems
during manufacturing,
the Apple Genius Bar
employee helping restore my lost data,
my web developer,
the barista or bartender serving me while I
write, the UPS or FedEx driver delivering proofs,
the neighbor
whose dog pops over to play ball while I’m editing,
the
dog herself who wants to pay ball . . .
all these people are actually people (except
the dog, who is not a person but
thinks she is, so we’ll keep her on the list). They are, each of them, beloved ones of God with dreams and hopes and problems
and opportunities and relationships and needs and gifts and strengths.
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IT IS WHAT YOU MAKE O F IT
They are the kinds of people worth making
great work for. Which also makes them
the kinds of people worth stopping great work for,
whether or not they’re directly part of that work process or not.
They aren’t stepping-stones on my path to success.
They aren’t cogs in the wheel of my productivity. They aren’t part of my “system.”
Even (and especially) if they’re part of my team working
to complete a project.
Remember a moment ago when I asked you to imagine being the technician on the other
end of the phone, staring at an entry
about the unconditional love of God
while the author of that page yells at you and
calls you names? Well, let’s take that one step further, shall we? Because that’s where the deeper
learning les- son was for me.
Imagine being my art
director, Gary, who took on that
final phone call to put the project back on track after I’d derailed it with my anger. Imagine working for nearly
two years on a project
ostensibly celebrating the unifying
love of God for people while watching your partner
and project leader verbally
abuse customer ser- vice
agents over the phone and then carry that anger around the office every day. Maybe you’d lose respect for that person. Maybe you’d have a hard
time trusting them as a leader
or a friend. Maybe you might even
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EvERYBO DY HURTS, EvERYBO
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decide that was the last time you’d work with
that per- son or anyone like them if
it meant being treated that way or being party to treating
others that way.
You
see, what I know now is that how I treat the
people I work with . . . nope. Let me fix that:
What I know now is that
how I love the
people I work with and for and around
says ten thousand times more about
who I am than any project or job or end result, regardless of its effectiveness, beauty, impact, or market success. I’d rather make
garbage work while honoring and
maintaining great relationships than cre- ate bestselling work while becoming
the kind of person nobody
wants to be around.
It was and is the love in
Jesus that was and is the source of
healing, whether on the street in a crowd or
in the back room of a powerful
social figure—which is to say, Jesus was the same person wherever
he went.
I want to live like that.
I want that kind of love to dictate the way I
work. The way I’d addressed
the young man at the print-
ing agency had almost nothing to do with his
job or position or the fact that I didn’t personally
know him; it had everything to do with me and my
character. Yes, the professional
distance between us made it easier for me to be unkind,
but the capacity
to dehumanize some-
one and use them for my own purposes was in me from
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IT IS WHAT YOU MAKE O F IT
the start. And here is something true: I don’t get to (and
shouldn’t want to) make anything out of someone else’s life. That’s not my job. My vision isn’t big enough for your life. That’s God’s job. Only divine
hands can make something out of a
human life without belittling, stifling, and minimizing that person in the process.
About four years after that first book came out, my third book hit the shelves. It was a
book of prayers I’d collected from my
own practice, born out of trying to
live more intentionally. Among them was the prayer I wrote shortly
after the completion of The CMYK Project. It reads,
May the work I do
never become more important to me than the people I get to work with or those I’m working for.
Taken from “It Is What You Make of It” by Justin McRoberts.
Copyright 2021 by Justin McRoberts. Used with permission from Thomas Nelson.
