Cleaning toilets and a view of success

I spent yesterday on my knees, not in prayer, but cleaning toilets and scrubbing the floors.  It was not as gruelling as it sounds, but at the same time, I was pondering a quote I read about what matters in life. Was I wasting my time?

A friend signs her emails with a quote from Francis Chan's book Crazy Love:  Overwhelmed By A Relentless God:  "Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter."

I was scrubbing shower floors.  What could matter in that for eternity?

And all through the day, God reminded me that it is not mine to know how He will use me, or this situation, or when, or for whom. Everything matters.  It is not a judgement of failure or success -- neither which I can determine, neither of which matters to God -- but of faithfulness in following Him into it and in doing all things with excellence.  That which is done well glorifies God.

The Reformation, sparked in 1517 by Martin Luther's nailing of a document on the Wittenberg door, tore down the wall between what at the time was considered sacred and secular.  There is no divide.  God never intended there to be.  One's work --committed to God-- can glorify the LORD, no matter what it may be.  Church work is no more spiritual or sacred than that of the merchant or the streetsweeper.  And the result of the Reformation unleashed a tremendous era of music and art, scientific discoveries, exploration, mathematics, and architecture that the world has ever known.  It all matters.

Indeed, Johan Sebastian Bach even signed his magnificent compositions "Soli Deo Gloria," glory to God alone.

A man known as  Brother Lawrence also grasped that divine mandate. At the age of 24 in the year 1638, he joined a monastery in Paris with the intention of doing great things for God.  He was assigned instead to wash dishes in the kitchen which he did faithfully and cheerfully for more than three decades, and in his last years, repairing the sandals of the other monks.  No job was too lowly or seemingly obscure.  His spiritual insight and encouragement to others was compiled after his death in a book The Practice of the Presence of God, still read widely almost 400 years later, still pointing others to God.

It appears that our culture has once again fallen into a mindset that only what bears a "spiritual" label is sacred in the eyes of God and only in what we deem successful.  And we are poorer for it.

All that we do is sacred;  nothing is beyond what God can redeem.  We would stand amazed at how God can use us in every dimension of daily life and culture.   Even in that.

"God does not call us to be successful.  He calls us to be faithful.". --Mother Teresa.

Use us this day, LORD,
       for Your Kingdom,
whatever form that may take.

Let the favor of the LORD our God be upon us,
and establish thou the work of our hands upon us,
yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

                                            Psalm 90.17