Eight years of expensive schooling, hidden away at a mundane and “unimportant” job, a disappointment to parents and loved ones who had seen so much promise at the start… but I realized tonight, if David hadn’t been at that simple wasting-of-life-and-talents job, he may have never noticed the hidden sequence. The countdown. And the whole series of events would have changed and we would have lost him, the president and the world.
But perhaps I shouldn’t build my reassurances or life philosophy on a science fiction movie. Perhaps I should be looking elsewhere…
And what do I find there?
A simple cupbearer hidden away under exile who happened to be in the right position to rebuild and help restore the wall and the people…
A young lady taken for a harem in a strange land who happened to be in the right place and time to save her people from annihilation…
A lad with stars in his eyes who was sold into slavery (by his own family) and then ended up in prison which just happened to be the perfect position to save his family and all of Egypt…
A child with so much potential and promise who ends up a man hidden away as a mundane shepherd in the wilderness which just happened to be where God wanted him to call him onward?
A foreign young woman, her dreams and potential now as low as her widow’s covering, who chose the un-exciting, no-potential path of staying with her mother-in-law who just happened to end up in the right field of the right man and ended up an ancestor of kings and the Messiah!
And speaking of which… a “family runt” shepherd boy as warrior and king?!
The story is always the same.
And the story is never the same.
Big ways and small ways. Affecting families, kingdoms and the world.
“For who has despised the day of small things?” says the Lord to Zechariah. Or in another translation, “The people should not think that small beginnings are unimportant.”
And it was true when rebuilding the temple
—a temple that was a far cry in stature and pomp from Solomon’s—
and it’s true in many other situations…
…whenever God is at work (often behind the scenes) and we respond to where we are and what we have in our hands with trust in and obedience to Him.
Big ways.
Small ways.
Every way.
And I start this as a Facebook status, feeling facetious with my Independence Day metaphor, but it grows long so I decide to switch to a blog post and when I do my eye catches the mini notepad-on-magnet-clipboard on the magnetic note board by my desk—the one I questioningly scribbled a thought on way back in January—a thought about, perhaps, what this year was to be about. How it would be framed and focused.
And it wonders:
a year for “Little Things”?
Apparently.
May I not despise the day of small things.
Instead, may I trust and obey—
here where I am,
with what all or what little I have,
big ways,
small ways,
every way.
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