These moments come in a variety of different experiences, but they represent a dividing line. A moment that defines everything that comes before and after. Within this series, we are going to look at four different stories about remarkable watershed moments and how those moments transformed the people who experienced them. Using their examples, we will come to understand how their story teaches us much needed lessons about how we can move past the barriers preventing us from becoming the people who God intended for us to be.

Today, we begin our series with a story I’ve been waiting to tell you for a very long time. It begins in Lancaster, California in 1968. A twelve-year-old boy named Jim Doty crawled out of bed towards a small wooden box. This box held all of his worldly possessions, which included a number of magic tricks. As he rummaged through the box, he noticed that his most prized trick was missing—a fake plastic thumb. This plastic thumb was essential for performing a variety of illusions because you could discretely hide items inside of the thumb.

Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found. Jim was super upset by this because it wasn’t a simple matter of buying a new one. You see, Jim’s father was a severe alcoholic. Although his father would work, his alcoholism would usually result in him getting fired from his job or, if he did make enough money, he would spend it all on booze or end up in jail. A common occurrence was Jim coming home from school to find the police evicting the family from their apartment because they didn’t pay rent.

This reality wasn’t made any easier by his mother who suffered from severe depression. She would spend most of her day in bed. Sometimes, if she was feeling motivated, she would make dinner for her family, but often, even if she had the motivation, there wasn’t any food in the apartment. Jim was used to going to bed hungry. Indeed, Jim’s home life was so chaotic with his father being physically abusive that he had learned from an early age to fight for himself.

Usually, these fights were to defend his older brother, who was smaller and weaker than he was. But Jim had also developed an intense disdain for authority figures. He had been expelled from several schools. One time, a Catholic nun slapped Jim in the face for misbehaving and, without thinking, Jim slapped her back. At one point, Jim’s parents were so fed up with his behavior that they sent him to live with his aunt. When his aunt couldn’t handle him, she sent him back home to his mom and dad. Jim was the very definition of a reprobate.

Feeling unloved and unwanted, magic was Jim’s only escape from the harshness of his day-to-day life. This is why he was so upset to lose that fake thumb. Jim scoured his room and scrounged together what little money he had to his name and jumped on his bike. He had heard of a magic shop located across town that might sell such an item, so he made his way over to the shop.

Upon entering the store, he walked up to the counter. Sitting on a stool was an older brown-haired woman. She looked at Jim and said, “Hi, my name is Ruth. What’s your name?” Up until that moment, Jim had been called Bob by everyone in his life because his middle name was Robert. But with Ruth he said, “My name is Jim.” This is the name he would go by for the rest of his life.

Ruth said, “Well, Jim, how can I help you?” He said, “I’ve lost my fake thumb and I thought you might be able to help me find a replacement.” Ruth shrugged her shoulders and said, “I don’t know. Honestly, Jim, my son runs this store and he’s out right now.” Ruth could see that Jim was a bit disappointed, so she asked him, “Why do you like magic?” No adult had ever asked him a question about himself, let alone about magic. Jim thought for a moment and said, “I like being able to practice at something and get really good at it. I like that I’m in control. Whether the trick works or not is only up to me. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says or does or thinks.”

Ruth looked Jim over and said, “I like you, Jim. I like you a lot. I’m only going to be in town for six weeks, but if you agree to come see me every day for the next six weeks, I will teach you some real magic. The kind of magic that you can’t buy in a store and that will help you make anything you want actually appear. For real. No tricks. No plastic thumbs. No sleights of hand. How does that sound?” Jim was intrigued. Magic that could allow him to make anything he wants? Jim heartily agreed.

The next day, Jim arrived at 10am at the magic shop. Ruth greeted Jim and took him into the back office. There were two chairs facing each other. Ruth instructed Jim to sit in the chair. Jim sat down and Ruth sat across from him. She said, “Jim, are you nervous to be here?” Jim lied and said, “No.” Ruth placed her hand on Jim’s leg, which was bouncing up and down. “Jim, the first trick is to learn how to relax every muscle in your body. But it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Jim’s first thought is that he had never been relaxed at any point in his life. He was always in fight or flight mode. Ruth said, “When I asked you if you were nervous, you said, ‘No,’ but I could see your knee was shaking. The body is full of signs about what’s going on inside us. When you’re afraid, happy, excited, nervous, angry, jealous or sad, your mind might not know how you feel, but if you pay attention to your body, it will tell you.”

Then she told Jim to close his eyes. Ruth slowly walked him through a practice of relaxing every muscle in his body, starting with his toes and slowly working his way up through every muscle group until eventually they reached the muscles in his neck. When Ruth asked Jim to open his eyes, he said that for the first time in his life, he felt relaxed. Ruth said, “I want you to practice what we just did every day, but especially when your parents are fighting and life feels out of control.”

Jim did exactly as Ruth instructed her. After 10 days of practicing relaxing his body, Ruth was ready to teach Jim the next magic trick. Again, he was sitting in the chair across from her and she said, “All of us have a narrator inside of our minds. A voice that talks to us and tells us about who we are. We often confuse this voice with ourselves, but this is a mistake. You can’t trust the voice in your head. It’s more often wrong than right. You can think of this trick as learning to turn the volume of the narrator way down and, eventually, turning it off altogether.”

This time, after relaxing his body, Ruth asked Jim to focus on his breath. The goal was to empty the mind, pushing out all of the intrusive thoughts. Jim would focus on his breath for a few seconds and then his mind would wander. He eventually became frustrated and said, “I can’t do this.” Ruth said, “You absolutely can. Everyone is bad at this when they first start, but then they get better.

“What you need is a mantra. A mantra is a word or phrase you can repeat to yourself over and over again. It can be anything, it just needs to be meaningful to you.” Jim thought for a moment and chose two words: Chris, the cute girl who had moved in above him and knob, the doorknob to his apartment. So Jim’s mantra became Chris Knob. It sounded silly, but it worked. His mantra shut down the narrator in his mind.

After a few weeks of working on emptying his mind, Ruth moved onto the next magic trick. Ruth explained that once you shut down the narrator in your mind, you needed to replace the narrator with positive affirmations. So Ruth told Jim, “Every day when you wake up, I want you to say to yourself: I am worthy. I am loved. I am cared for. I care for others. I choose only good for myself. I choose only good for others. I love myself. I love others. I open my heart. My heart is open.” What Ruth told Jim is that every decision you make needs to begin with vulnerability and affirmation because without opening your heart, the final magic trick will take you to unexpected places. Places you don’t want to go.

It was now the end of the six weeks and the day had come for the final magic trick. Jim sat down across from Ruth, went through all the exercises she had taught him and then she said, “Close your eyes. What do you want more than anything in the world?” He didn’t know. He’d never thought about what he wanted other than not being poor. She said, “I want you to go home tonight and write down all the things you want in your life, but just remember, you need to open your heart first.”

The next day, Jim returned with his list and handed it over to Ruth. The list was as follows: 1) Don’t get evicted 2) Go on a date with Chris 3) Go to college 4) Be a doctor 5) A million dollars 6) Rolex 7) Porsche 8) Mansion 9) Island 10) Success. She said, “I didn’t know you wanted to be a doctor?” When Jim was in fourth grade, a doctor had come to talk to the class. After his presentation, Jim peppered him with questions. The doctor looked at Jim and said, “You have to study really hard, go to college and medical school, but most importantly you have to care about people.”

At the time, Jim couldn’t imagine himself going to college. Every teacher he had ever had discounted him. He was just a bad kid who would never amount to anything. But now, after his time with Ruth, the impossible seemed possible. He looked at Ruth and said, “Yes, I want to be a doctor.” Then he corrected himself. “I know I’m going to be a doctor.” She said, “That’s exactly it. You have to know you will be a doctor and then you have to picture it in your head as if you already were a doctor. See the world through your doctor’s eyes.”

Ruth told Jim that if he set his intention on becoming a doctor and visualized it every day, then that intention will become a reality. After that final lesson, Jim gave Ruth a hug and said, “Goodbye.” Jim would never speak to Ruth again for the rest of his life, but those six weeks in the magic shop would change the trajectory of his life. Jim kept practicing her techniques. Every day, he would relax himself, say his mantra to get rid of the negative narrator, repeat the positive affirmations and imagine himself as a doctor.

Even though his home life was still in complete chaos, Jim started improving in his studies. He did well in some classes, but not others. His senior year, the girl sitting next to him was filling out an application. Jim said, “What’s that all about?” She said, “I’m applying to UC Irvine. Where are you applying?” Jim knew nothing about college, so he said, “UC Irvine, but I don’t have an application.” She said, “Well, I just happen to have an extra one.” His grades weren’t good enough, but he envisioned the acceptance letter just like Ruth taught him and, somehow, he got in, but he had to support himself.

Balancing pre-med courses with a full-time job was exhausting. By the time he had reached his senior year, Jim had several unfinished courses and a 2.5 GPA due to leaving mid-semester to go home to help his mother who attempted suicide. He shouldn’t have been accepted, but he gave an impassioned speech to the UC Irvine Medical Review Board who gave him a letter of recommendation, which allowed him to get into Tulane University School of Medicine. This time, Jim excelled. With a scholarship from the army, he didn’t have to worry about money and earned the highest score in almost every class. As a result, Jim would go on to become one of the top neurosurgeons in the United States.

Of course, there’s so much more to this story that I left out. If you would like to know more about his life, you can read his book Into the Magic Shop. Now, you might be wondering, what does this have to do with Jesus or the scriptures we read this morning? Well, what’s interesting about the gospel of Mark is that it begins in Jesus’ adult life. It begins at Jesus’ baptism. Indeed, if you read between the lines, what you discover is that Mark is implying that Jesus is a different person before and after his baptism.

We know this because when Jesus goes to his hometown of Nazareth in Mark chapter 6, everyone is confused. This can’t be the same Jesus who grew up with us. We knew that guy and he wasn’t a teacher and preacher. He wasn’t capable of doing these magnificent miracles of healing. Literally, Jesus has this watershed moment at his baptism where, according to Mark, Jesus gains his wisdom and powers.

When I think of Jesus’ story, of how he returns to his hometown and nobody understands how this could have been possible, I think of Jim Doty. Most people, knowing Jim when he was growing up, would have probably said he was headed for a life of crime. If you would have told his teachers that he would grow up to become a world-famous neurosurgeon, they would have said, “No way! Impossible!”

Indeed, they would have been right if hadn’t been for Ruth. Without Ruth teaching him her magic tricks, he would have continued down the same path. He needed that watershed moment to change the trajectory of his life. I would argue that God did the same for Jesus at his baptism. Before the baptism, everyone would have said Jesus is not capable of such wisdom and acts of power. However, after his baptism, God changed the trajectory of his life, becoming the leader of the largest religion in the world.

So I pose the question to you: What have been the watershed moments in your life? Who was the person who appeared at just the right time to completely change the trajectory of your life? Maybe it was a teacher; maybe it was a coach; maybe it was a pastor; or maybe, like Jesus, God moved inside of your heart and changed you unexpectedly. The truth is, we all need a magic shop in our lives. We all need a Ruth to show us the way; a baptism that gives us a fresh start.

God always desires for us to reach our potential, but often times we can’t do that on our own. Even Jesus needed a watershed moment and so we all need a little bit of magic to show us the way. What I want to know is where you found that magic in your life? Write to me and tell me because I want to know how you were transformed into the person who God intended for you to be. Amen.