Starry Starry Night
“During my teen years God used authors, poets, and songwriter/singers to touch my soul at strategic points. Don McLean’s music and lyrics had long ago roused my imprisoned calling, fanning the embers for one very special night in Utopia Texas.
While McLean’s song “Starry Starry Night” was an epitaph to the famous artist Vincent Van Gogh, it became an invitation for me to paint with words like these from his endearing lyrics:
Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue
Now I understand What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now
His eloquent words had meaning for me. Like Van Gogh, I didn’t feel understood. While outwardly I seemed successful as a teenager, inside something was missing. I was lost. In the words of another McLean song, it was “the day the music died.”
Along the way, the strong influence of conformity with its relentless tentacles had overpowered the dream God had for me. I was racing on an autobahn without exit ramps, and its speed was exhausting.
However, the Dream Guardian rescued me on a starry, starry night in Utopia when I was 48. I found an abandoned seed bin on our ranch half full of fifty-year-old seed stuck within its rusty walls. I took a seed and planted it that night in the middle of a huge field as a symbol to God that I was all in and was releasing the dream seed that He had planted within me before the beginning of time. I watered the seed with my salty tears and fertilized it with the celestial stardust of history’s day four. The billion-star sky that night was twinkling as if applauding what was happening.
All life starts with a seed, it’s no different with faith. We plant through a declaration to God that we believe and then water it with faith along the way even when we can’t see anything changing. But God is at work on the backstory in His timing and providence, then a plant miraculously emerges. And when it does, we move in awe as we watch it grow into a seed-producing miracle that becomes part of our testimony.”
- Did He Make The Putt: The Question That Changed Eternity, pg. 23-25
"…unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds."
- John 12:23
Join Dr. Cook in the locker room, behind the bench, and in the boardroom as he shares the hidden principles of greatness. This unique vantage point and the stories that unfold will inspire and equip you on the journey to your dreams. greatness is open to all but only pursued by a few. It is the space beyond success where calling and legacy meet and a noble heart is required.
Get the book for yourself or as a gift and invite your loved ones to discover the space beyond success, the place of their true calling.