Unless You Read This Bit the Rest Just Won't Make Sense
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.
Ecclesiastes 4:9 - King Solomon
This book is all about just one thing - helping you to discover who you are and where you fit in; helping you to know beyond any shadow of doubt who God made you to be and what He made you to do.
If God is God - then He made each one of us to be precisely who He intended us to be and He set a life before us to do precisely what He intended for us to do. And unless He made a mistake, then those two - who we are and what we're called to do - should fit like a hand in a glove.
If God is indeed God, then it stands to reason doesn't it?
This book is born out of the passion of one man - Keith Henry - who in 1988 almost died in a surfing accident. He should have been dead lying there on the beach; he should have been dead when the rescue helicopter crashed … but he isn't. At the very least, he should be a paraplegic … but he isn't. Because God had a plan …
During his painful recovery over the next two decades, God led Keith to study in depth, what have long been referred to as the "motivational giftings" in Romans Chapter 12, verses 6 to 8, of the New Testament:
We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness. (Romans 12:6-8)
Now we don't use the term "motivational giftings" so much anymore. The more common term is "Personality Types". Keith studied these Personality Types in the Bible, not from a worldly "me-centred" perspective, but from a biblical, Christ-centred perspective.
And these days when Keith stands up and speaks about what he's learned, you can hear a pin drop.
Everybody stops and listens. People are truly captivated, because deep down we all hunger to know who we are and what we're meant to be doing with our lives. And deep down, most of us simply don't know those things about ourselves.
As Keith discovered though, it doesn't have to be that way.
That's what this book's all about. But when it came to writing a book, Keith had a bit of a problem.
He's an "Encourager" (you can read about his Personality Type in Chapter 7). Encouragers are the sort of people we all love being around because they make us feel good about ourselves. But generally, they don't have the sort of strong verbal, linguistic skills that you need to write a book. He always knew that God wanted him to get out and tell this story about the different Personality Types we discover in His Word, but given who God had made Keith to be - he had no real way of telling that story.
In 2007 he met another man - Berni Dymet. Berni's Personality Type is that of the "Leader" (Chapter 14) and it turns out that more often than not, these people have strong verbal, linguistic skills. Now that's something that Berni had already discovered about himself - having embarked on God's call to share the Good News of Jesus by telling stories through his radio programs heard by millions of people each week around the globe.
And the more Keith and Berni talked, the more they dreamed God's dreams over coffee at their favourite coffee shop - the more they came to the conclusion that together, they had to write this book.
But when it came to making the rubber hit the road - they encountered a very real problem. It was one that, unless it was resolved, would have prevented them from writing this book.
And that problem was this: How do two people - Keith who's developed the detailed knowledge of the Personality Types through two decades of study, and Berni who has the story-telling ability but nowhere near Keith's level of knowledge - actually sit down and write a book together? How do you actually do that?
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