Solomon built God’s Temple with the best the earth had to offer — and he never settled.

He sent word to Hiram, king of Tyre, and negotiated a deal bringing him the finest timber in the world down from the mountains of Lebanon—cedar so dense and fragrant that it resisted rot for centuries, so beautiful that it seemed wrong to cover it with anything at all. The planks arrived by sea, floated on rafts, hauled by thirty thousand men working in shifts. Solomon was building a house for God.

I think about that a lot when I look at the people God chooses. I wonder if I would’ve made the same choices?

Remember, the twelve disciples were fishermen, a tax collector, and a zealot who probably despised the tax collector. The woman at the well carried a complicated history and a water jar she’d been filling alone for years. Gideon was hiding in a winepress when the angel showed up and called him a mighty warrior. Moses stuttered. David was the youngest. Peter kept putting his foot in his mouth even after he’d seen the empty tomb.

Every one of them ordinary. That’s the whole point.

When God builds His living temple—the one made of real human people rather than cedar—He starts with called material. There’s a difference between polished and called. Polished means you’ve already been shaped into something smooth and presentable. Called? It means He sees what you’re becoming. It means He picks you up as-is and says: I know what I’m doing with this. A potter with a lump of clay.

He sees something in us that we’re still learning to see in ourselves.

I know that gap, because I’ve felt it. I’ve applied for jobs where the skills were close but the fit was off, where the culture pointed one direction and I pointed another, where a search committee looked at what I offered and kept looking. Those moments sting. Especially when you are ghosted, forgotten about because the decision was made. And you weren’t the choice.

Rejection by people—even well-meaning people doing reasonable things—lands hard. It’s one thing to know, theologically, that God’s call is bigger than any hiring process. It’s another thing to sit with a polite email on a Monday morning and actually believe it.

The call God places on our life runs far deeper than any job description. What He invites us into is more specific, more layered, more kingdom-shaped than any role a search committee could define. His work, designed specifically for us, carries eternal meaning. Worth holding onto — especially when the rejection emails keep coming.

He calls us His. He is shaping us. He strengthens the places we think are soft. And He places us—deliberately, specifically—right where He wants us in the structure He is raising up across history.

It’s architecture. That’s His intentionality on a scale we can spend a lifetime discovering.

If God has called you, you are chosen material. You are a name He spoke on purpose. He sees you as worthy—and worth it—because you belong to the One who is making all things new. He is building something that will outlast every empire, every institution, every tremor that shakes the things that can be shaken.

You are in it. Part of it. Placed there on purpose.

That’s what sets this living Temple apart from Solomon’s. Solomon imported the finest timber the world could provide. God looks at the people the world has overlooked, the ones still becoming what He always saw, and says: These. Bring me these.

And then He builds something beautiful.

You are chosen. Called. Not qualified.

Not yet.