Words by Bev Jones
Ordinary to Extraordinary
I have come to realise as no doubt many others have, that amazing things can happen when ordinary people allow God the opportunity and time to speak into their heart.
Ordinary acts take on an extraordinary importance and significance at challenging times, and people are brought together in ways that would have seemed impossible just a short time ago. Who would have thought a month ago, that watching a 99 year old former soldier walk up and down his garden would reduce a nation to tears, raise in excess of twenty million pounds and be something that both national and international news organisations would air in prime time television slots? Who would have thought that our sense of community would have been strengthened by seeing people banging a wooden spoon on a pan at 8pm outside their front doors on a Thursday evening? Who even thought that would be a good idea?
Photo by Jude Beck via Unsplash
And yet each week, more and more folk are making as much noise as they can to try and communicate the debt of gratitude that our nation has towards an organisation that up until a couple of months ago, many of us probably took very much for granted. We are living in extraordinary times where many of us may be feeling that we want desperately to do something, yet have no idea where to start. There are so many people and so much need, and all this at a time when most of us are staying home. Mother Teresa speaking about her work in Calcutta said this:
“I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time – just one, one, one. So you begin. I began – I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two thousand….The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin – one, one, one.”
As we spend this Sunday in our homes, worshipping in whatever way we are coming to accept as normal, perhaps it would be good to ask God to put on our heart one person that he wants us to love, and then ask him how he wants us to show that love, and be willing to start there. God always starts with us where we are and with what we’ve got, and so the boundaries of our homes won’t contain the works that he longs for us to do. In fact, the boundaries of our homes will become the foundation of what He wants to do. We just have to be willing to surrender who we are and what we’ve got, into the hands of Him who can turn the ordinary into extraordinary.
This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice. You won’t lose out on a thing. Matthew 10:42 (MSG)
- Bev Jones
19/4/20
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