He didn’t want to do it. The job he’d been asked to paled in comparison to his passions and hobbies, fields where he was already making a name for himself. This job was repetitive, strenuous, obscure, boring and pathetic – a stranglehold. Yet when his father asked, he had to answer. He reluctantly said yes. But this wasn’t how he saw spending the rest of his life. It wasn’t what he was born to do.

Hard to believe, but Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the Sistine Chapel.

He was a sculptor, not a painter. Yet when Pope Julius II asked him to change his plans from sculpting a tomb to painting a chapel, he agreed. Was it duty? Politics? Faith?

Have you ever been asked to do something you didn’t want to do? Did you do it anyway? If you did, you probably learned something. You may have learned you have untapped talents. You may have found fresh sources of joy and fulfillment. Or you may have learned that there are very good reasons you didn’t want to do it in the first place. At the very least you learned obedience or submission, although you may have learned them by their equal-but-opposite monikers of rebellion and pride.

Carefully consider your next appointment. It just might be divine.