The Reshaping of Personal
Ambition
What is it about ambition that has given it a bad name? Is being ambitious bad in itself? Or is only overweening ambition bad? Or should we also consider lack of focused ambition bad?
Can the Master Potter use only those who have no real ambition in life, who perhaps will be totally submitted to Him? Will He remove ambition when the new nature, energized by the Holy Spirit, takes over? Or does He reshape ambition so it becomes part of the "us" that God wants to use to His glory?
Consider the example of Lydia, the businesswoman the apostle Paul met outside the city gate of Philippi. She is identified as a member of a group of God-worshipers who had gathered on the banks of a river. There she sat in the small circle, listening intently as Paul talked with them about Jesus, the Messiah. Lydia quickly concluded that this made sense; as Luke puts it, "the Lord opened her heart." She and the members of her household believed the message of new life in Christ and were baptized.
Now, Lydia was no fly-by-night businesswoman.
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No discount store featuring leftover cloth for her. The Bible says she was a seller of purple cloth from Thyatira, the most expensive cloth on the market. She had not made her mark sitting at home and merely plying her needle or weaving cloth. She went where there was a market for purple, or royal, cloth — Philippi, a Roman city in what we today call Greece. She was clearly an ambitious woman.
As a result of her ambitious pursuit of her business, Lydia had become a wealthy woman. She had a household of servants, who clearly were extremely loyal to her. They all joined her in making a commitment to Jesus Christ.
Personal Ambition Reshaped
Lydia's first act as a new believer in Jesus was to invite the apostle Paul and those who accompanied him into her home. The invitation was accepted, and he seems to have made her home his base for ministry in that city.
This ministry includes Paul's driving out the demonic spirit in the woman following them. Luke describes Paul and Silas being beaten and thrown into jail, where an earthquake opened all the doors. He portrays the terror of the jailer, who thought all the prisoners had escaped, but also the conversion of the jailer once he had heard the message of God's forgiveness.
Paul stayed the night in the jailer's home. The magistrates, apparently before they heard of the earthquake and potential jailbreak, sent an early morning message to the jailer to release Paul and Silas. Paul decided to stand on his rights as a Roman citizen, so he let the magistrates know they had made
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a big mistake in the Roman world, beating a Roman citizen, and from his perspective a secret release would have gotten them off too lightly. Red-faced and apologetic magistrates were forced to publicly accompany Paul and Silas from prison.
Where did Paul and Silas go? To the home of Lydia, the lady who had given them hospitality before they were imprisoned.
Strangely, even though Paul mentions numerous women in his various letters, he never mentions Lydia. Did she go back to Thyatira to share the gospel in her home community? Did she take ill and die? We really don't know.
We can, it seems to me, make two deductions, based on circumstantial evidence. We know that Paul told the Philippians that in the early months of his travels in Macedonia, they had been more generous in sharing with him financially than any other church. He wrote: "Now you Philippians know also that in the beginning of the gospel, when I departed from Macedonia, no church shared with me concerning giving and receiving but you only" (Phil. 4:15).
My guess is that Lydia was responsible for that. The ambitious, money-driven seller of purple had her ambition shaped by the Master Potter. Now she was helping others so they could share the gospel freely — especially the apostle Paul, who had brought her the message of new life in Christ.
A second deduction may be made from the last book of the Bible. In the book of Revelation, the apostle John is told to write messages to seven churches. There on the list of seven churches is Thyatira. Is it possible that Lydia, the seller of purple, returned to her home city and began sharing her newfound faith
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in Jesus Christ? Could it be that her family may have been responsible for founding the church mentioned in Revelation? Ambition redirected is a powerful force for good, it would appear, if we are reading the story of Lydia right.
I know a few things about ambition, as you have realized by now. As I reached adulthood, my ambition resulted in a two-decade battle for recognition as an entertainer. I fought for money, billing, and applause. I winced when ovations for others eclipsed mine. As an outspoken, aggressive woman, I found it hard to let anyone take credit for anything I thought belonged to me — especially when a man took the credit.
I guess you could say I was born ambitious. As a little girl I wanted to be a dancer, a ballerina, an entertainer — anything but what my parents wanted me to be, a schoolteacher. I saw elopement with my boyfriend as my escape route. His departure and our divorce put a temporary hold on my ambitions, but when my mother, my son Tom, and I moved to Memphis, my ambitions rekindled.
I was accepted at a business school even though I had not finished my junior year in high school. After business school an insurance company hired me as secretary, but I was more interested in show business than in the insurance business. My job gave me the income to do what I really wanted to do: establish myself as an entertainer.
Thwarted Ambitions
Off the job, I spent a great deal of time singing and accompanying myself on the piano. Initially I wrote
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short stories, but they only produced a parade of rejection slips. So I tried writing songs. Finally I wrote one that I thought was good enough to submit to a music publisher. I submitted it in person, sang it in the publisher's office, and was flattered by a vague promise that they would consider it. I waited for several months, then one day when I was in a music store I saw my tune, slightly altered, on sheet music bearing the name of another composer. I was devastated.
One day I was staring vaguely at an accident claim form in my typewriter. In reality, I was trying to come up with words for a tune I had just composed. My boss walked in, stood looking at me for a moment, and exploded, "Young lady, I think you are in the wrong business!" My fingers flew to the keyboard, and I typed like a maniac. He walked away, turned back, and asked, smiling, "How would you like to sing on a radio program?"
I was on cloud nine. I was about to step on the first rung of my ambitious ladder to the top in entertainment. The next Friday night Frances Fox made her radio debut, singing "Mighty Lak a Rose." I dedicated my song to my son, Tom. Someone must have liked it, for I was offered a regular spot in programming at the radio station.
Although singing on the radio provided no income, the exposure further fueled my ambition to be an entertainer. I was soon invited to sing at luncheons and banquets of civic organizations in town. Once in a while I got paid in real money; mostly I was paid in chicken croquettes and peas. But the experience was good, and soon I moved up to the most powerful radio station in Memphis.
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Ambition, but No Common Sense
Ambition overcame common sense. As I became more popular I decided that if I could conquer Memphis, I could crack Chicago. But I did not crack Chicago — it broke me. After a few short years I wound up with a case of severe anemia due to overwork as a secretary. My parents had moved back to a farm in Texas, so I wired for money to go home. We were a miserable pair, Tom and I, as we rode the train to Texas, and I entered the hospital for two weeks of treatment with iron.
Three more months of rest fired up the old ambition. In the fall of that year I landed a good-paying job at radio station WHAS, where the program director gave me the name Dale Evans. It was designed primarily for ease of pronunciation for radio announcers — it is almost impossible to mispronounce or misspell.
That's where God made a serious attempt to redirect my ambition, when He let Tom become seriously ill with what even the doctors thought was polio, so I made lots of commitments to God as I walked and prayed in the halls of the hospital.
Ambition Stronger Than Spiritual Devotion
But my musical ambition was too strong, stronger than my spiritual devotion. This time I found a job as singer on the staff of radio station WFAA in Dallas. One day I had a phone call from a pianist and orchestral arranger I had dated frequently in Louisville. He said he was on his way to California to seek his fortune, and he wanted to stop in Dallas to see me.
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He stopped, was given a job with WFAA, and one year later we were married.
Ambition took over again two years later, so we moved to Chicago, where I landed a job as vocalist at the Balinese Room at the Blackstone Hotel. Later I was given a job as a jazz singer at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. But ballad singers were more popular than jazz vocalists, so I kept looking. I got on with the Anson Week's Orchestra, which played at the Aragon Ballroom, but also did one-nighters hundreds of miles apart. My schedule became too hectic for me.
By this time Tom was entering junior high school, and I wanted him with me. I auditioned for a job at WBBM, a CBS network station, and got it. I also sang at the Sherman and Drake hotels. I knew I was going places when I made it to the top spot, the then famous Chez Paree Supper Club.
Now that I had Tom with me I was again going to church regularly. I wanted him to have what I would not accept for myself — a solid relationship with the Lord. Every so often the minister would speak on the "claims of Christ," but I wanted nothing to do with them, suspecting they would interfere with my ambitions. I told myself that my motivation was to guarantee a good future for Tom, helping him to go to college. He clearly had inherited my musical bent and would benefit from special training.
My real ambition during these years was to get into musical comedy in New York. My lack of dancing skills prevented that from happening when I was invited to join a Broadway show. But that ambition did not die.
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Ambition and Compromise
Thus I laughed long and loud when I received a telegram from a Hollywood agent. He had heard me sing on a broadcast that reached California and asked for photographs of me. I considered this a real laugh, since I was convinced I was not pretty enough for the movies. On top of that, I was twenty-eight years old — too old, I thought, to begin in Hollywood. So I ignored the telegrams, but they kept on coming.
I finally took the telegrams to the program director at the radio station, who said I should give it a whirl. Still laughing, I took the inevitable glamour photos and sent them to the agent. He wired me to take a plane immediately for a screen test at Paramount Pictures.
My agent put through a whirlwind of beauty preparations for my screen test. When I was asked about my age, my agent shouted, "Twenty-one." The day of the test I was carefully made up and gowned. As I sat there waiting for the crew to set up the lights, a sense of doubt and shame swept over me. I felt as though I would blow up because I was basically against deception, and my age was being misrepresented. Ambition was coming up against the biblical principles I had gained at home and in church, even though I still rejected the claims of the Master Potter on my life.
I walked over to my agent and told him I needed to talk to him. We walked out into the alley behind the studio and I said, "I have not been honest with you. I cannot go on with this thing until you know the facts. I am not twenty-one; I am twenty-eight. I have a son who is twelve years old. He lives with me."
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His jaw dropped. He muttered, "Let me think, let me think." Suddenly he said, "You will have to send him away to school." I refused, saying that if Tom could not come to Hollywood with me, I would stay in Chicago. By this time the agent had invested too much effort and money in me to give up easily, so he tried another tack, "Tom is your brother. Do you understand?"
I still did not like it, but it gave me a chance to have Tom with me in Hollywood. So I said, "It's all right with me, if it's all right with Tom."
Tom responded, "It sounds pretty silly, but you can do anything you want, as long as I myself don't have to lie."
I figured if what I could make on a Hollywood job would send Tom to college and give him the musical education he so desperately wanted, that would help me achieve my ambition for my son. So I put aside my feelings of guilt and let my ambition take the reins.
Although Paramount did not take me, I did get on with Twentieth-Century Fox for a year at $400 per week, a princely sum compared to what I was getting in Chicago. We moved to West Los Angeles, rented a house large enough to include my husband's parents, and I prepared for another screen test. The first picture I was to begin was shelved because of Pearl Harbor. I started drama lessons, waiting for the next break.
Tom disappeared when there was any movie publicity work going on around the house. He told me again that he could never lie as I was lying, even for his own mother. He couldn't, he said, because he was a Christian, and Christians don't lie. That stung, but my ambition was strong enough to smother the lie
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and the guilt. I rationalized that I was doing it for him, for his future. I loved him and was proud of his natural musical ability. After a year at Twentieth-Century Fox I had had two bit parts in movies. I had also participated in a lot of shows for the boys in the Army camps. Then just before my contract was up, my agent joined the Air Force. Sure enough, I learned the studio would not renew my contract. Desperate, I called my agent and asked him to recommend someone who would get me back onto radio. He recommended Art Rush, whom I discovered was totally engrossed in working with a cowboy singer named Roy Rogers. All he could talk about was Roy.
Ambition and Moral Compromise
Art did get me an audition with NBC's "The Chase and Sanborn Hour," and I was hired. Everything seemed to be okay until I turned down the invitation to have dinner with a top executive in New York. Beginners usually accept such invitations, but I told him I had a previous engagement with an old friend in the music publishing business. God was shaping my future and changing my ambition through the moral values I had gained at home and through my Bible reading and church attendance. I was not ambitious enough to totally reject my Christian values by having dinner with him; I was married.
The executive turned cold as ice. He eventually thawed enough to give me another chance — and another invitation to lunch. Again I turned him down. He took my turndowns as a personal insult, I discovered. The following fall I found myself replaced after
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the fourth show, with no hope of getting another commercially sponsored program for that season.
God kept providing opportunities for me to come to terms with my ambition — and let Him begin shaping it. My husband, Tom, and I attended First Baptist Church of Hollywood, where the pastor was what I call an "upsetter." Dr. Harold Proppe, it seemed to me, threw spiritual "shoes" at me, daring me to put them on. I kidded myself into thinking that I couldn't follow Him all the way now. Someday, when I was really safe and secure and ready to retire with enough money, I would give more time to Him and His work. I was furious one Sunday when Dr. Proppe suggested that people who had God-given talents in music and refused to honor God's house by using them there were disobedient. I just knew he was aiming right at me. I thought to myself, "Brother, if you only knew how demanding show business is, you wouldn't say that. I'm lucky to be here once a week."
Ambition Destroys Marriage
Ambition took its toll on my marriage as well. My husband worked evenings; I was up before dawn and ready for bed when he left. Although he did accompany me on the piano as often as he could when I sang at military bases, our opposite schedules drove us apart. In Hollywood, schedules are not made for the convenience of man and wife and children. You go where you have to go and do what you have to do, and married bliss can wait. We were making money, but the marriage didn't last. I tasted the bitterness of another failure in marriage.
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My shift to Art Rush brought another person with Christian convictions into my life. Art had planned to go into the ministry, but halfway through a Christian college he decided against that and changed his degree. That did not dampen his faith or destroy the effects of an early Christian training. He never lost his love for God and the Bible. We talked a great deal about the Bible when we were together, and how he was trying to apply its laws to his life and work. This impressed me greatly.
At the same time I became really upset over Art's preoccupation with his big client, Roy Rogers. So I left him and signed up with Danny Winkler, who got me a year's contract with Republic Studios. In two weeks I was in a country musical called Swing Your Partner. At the end of the year Republic picked up my option.
My first picture was a western with a treatment similar to Oklahoma on Broadway. I gasped when I was told that the picture would star Roy Rogers. I hesitated, mumbling something about my ambition to get into a big sophisticated musical, and that I had never thought of doing westerns. Still, my heart reminded me that I had loved westerns ever since I was a kid in Texas — had always loved cowpokes and horses, as a good Texan should. But my whole theatrical ambition had been on the musical comedy side. On top of that, I had not been on a horse since the age of seven.
Ambition Goes Western
But God knew what He was about: He was shaping my ambition so I would fit into the plan He had for me with Roy Rogers and our international family. Despite a crash course in learning to ride and being
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saved from serious injury by quick action by Roy when my horse bolted, that first picture was a success. Eight films later I knew I was typecast — for good, it seemed. I tried to get out by leaving Republic Pictures, but failed to go anywhere and was invited back.
God shaped my ambition even more dramatically after I married Roy Rogers, beginning with the experience with the Master Potter as a result of Jack MacArthur's sermon. Republic Pictures' dismissal of me after marrying Roy had already changed my ambition from being a star in the movies to being a super mom to Roy's children. That new ambition became sharply focused after I gave my life totally over to the Master Potter less than two months after our marriage.
How do I know? Not long after both Roy and I had gone forward to commit our lives to Jesus Christ, my agent called to ask if I would like to do a leading role in the London company of Annie Get Your Gun. A year or so earlier I would have jumped at the opportunity. This was the big show toward which I had been pointing all my life. Yet it was clear to me now that I would work with Roy if I worked at all. As a result, Art Rush and I bought back my contract from Danny Winkler so that Art could be the agent for both Roy and me, even though I felt foolish doing it after ditching Art earlier.
Did this reshaping of ambition take me out of entertainment? Let me ask a parallel question. Did the Lord's reshaping of the apostle Paul's ambition after his Damascus road experience change his commitment to public ministry? Did Luke forget that he was a trained doctor after becoming the historian on the apostle Paul's team? No, in all three instances. My greatest fear as a youth had been that God would
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send me to Africa as a missionary; instead he let Roy and me become His ambassadors to the world through our television ministry, our testimonies at Billy Graham crusades, and our personal appearances.
Ambition and the Family
That does not mean that I recognized that after I committed my life to Christ. At that point I had just assumed the role of stepmother to Roy's three children, and I was quite prepared to let being a wife and mother be my role for some years. I felt I had missed out on raising Tom, since I had him with me only sporadically, and he had really been raised by my mother.
I sorely missed being part of my son's toddling years, seeing him play in his first ballgame, being the one to personally buy his first "knee-pant suit." I was working in an office (of necessity because of my failed marriage), struggling to get into show business (not of necessity) during those years. I remember how I cried over my little boy's absence when I left him with my mother and traveled to Chicago to try to break into show business. I was determined not to make the same mistake twice, giving my career first place because of ambition.
The wife of a friend, on the other hand, let the Lord shape her ambition during her children's crucial formative years. Although she had worked part-time in radio drama in Chicago, she had also been a vocal soloist in oratorio since fourteen. When she entered a music festival in Chicago while her children were still preschoolers, she placed second and was invited to become the student of the leading opera coach
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in the city. Months later the artistic director of the Chicago Lyric Opera asked her to join the opera company in a new production.
Imagine the surprise of the vocal coach and the artistic director when she replied, "I'm sorry, but I cannot take on such a demanding role now. I have seen too many musicians divorce because they had no time left for their spouses. My husband and two children are more important than a career in opera at this time."
She continued to sing in her church and as soloist in oratorio, but she was also involved as choir leader. When her daughter was in college and her son in his junior year in high school, she agreed to teach music part-time in a Christian day school. Twenty years after turning down the opportunity in Chicago she auditioned for a regional opera company — and embarked on seven years of growing success. Now she could help ambitious young people come to terms with their insecurities and relationship problems.
When asked if she ever regretted turning down the plum role she was offered, she replies, "Never! Not when I see what the Lord has done in our children's lives — and what He has done in our marriage." Now she is rejoicing in her role as grandmother, with both son and daughter happily married, singing to two lovely granddaughters.
Looking back on my experience of being a multiethnic, multicultural family I say, "Right on!" At this stage sixteen grandchildren and twenty-seven great-grandchildren make me so thankful I took the time to be a mother rather than just fulfilling my ambition to be a superstar entertainer. The many trips we took as a family during the summers, and the opportunities
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the children had to participate in the shows cemented us as a family. Fulfilling my ambition to have a large family proved far more satisfying than being a lead singer or a leading lady in westerns.
Refocused Ambition
Here's how the apostle Paul expressed his reshaped ambition:
I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. (Gal. 2:20)
In writing to the Philippians he puts it a little differently, but with the same focus:
Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish...that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Phil. 3:8, 10-11)
Once I gained that focus on becoming like Christ, being His ambassador, achieving His plans for my life, my personal ambition was indeed changed. The Master Potter now was able to continue shaping it to suit His purposes throughtout the forty-six years since then. Not that I was ever perfect, just as the apostle
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Paul insists he did not reach perfection on earth, but I knew what I was here for — to serve the Master Potter with all the talents and abilities He has given me. We'll get into that a little more in the next chapter.
Reflecting on the Shaping
1. Why do you think Lydia of Thyatira was so ready to have her ambition reshaped when she heard the message of life in Christ from the apostle Paul?
2. What escape routes have you taken to attempt to fulfill your own ambition?
3. What compromises have you faced as you have attempted to fulfill your ambition?
4. If you are a young mother, has the Lord been talking to you about personal ambition? Could you put it on hold until the children are older so the Master Potter can shape your mothering role?
5. What is God saying to you about priorities as you read Philippians 3:8-11?
