“How important it is to share with our children our own personal scrapbook of the faithfulnes of God – the different ways He has led us, provided for us, and sheltered us. Our children need to hear again and again… Then they, too, will come to depend upon Him personally, knowing He will also be ever faithful to them.”
--Ruth Bell Graham
Footprints of a Pilgrim
page 136
Only three things are most important in what you do today:
Do it in His name.
Do it with excellence.
Do it,
not AS IF it matters,
but do it with all your heart, soul, mind and strength,
because it matters.
A new advertisement for Hewlett Packard states:
“If you’re going to do something,
make it matter.”
No half-hearted, grumbling, going through the motions.
You are serving the LORD
in whatever you do,
whatever He places in your path today,
whomever He puts on your radar.
My grandmother was a piano teacher for almost four decades.
Each lesson, she gave her students a report of their progress
to encourage them to strive.
At the top of that card was printed her motto:
“It’s not what you play. It’s how you play it.”
Her violinist daughter (my mom) could play
the most difficult sonata
or the simplest hymn
and bring tears to the eyes of those who heard it.
Excellence.
In His name.
Because it matters.
That is your assignment for the day.
Whatever your task,
work heartily,
as serving the LORD and not men…
Colossians 3.23
…to serve Him
with all your heart
and with all your soul.
Joshua 22.5
Right now, all of England is celebrating with great hoopla the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. In 1957, when I was a little four year old girl and Queen Elizabeth was still a young woman and newly crowned queen, she visited the Buckingham Fountain in Chicago. My grandmother and I traveled into the city by train to see the Queen. I still have vivid memories of that day, the crowds, the beautiful blue day on the lakefront, and the long red carpet.
And today, as a grown woman, I think about Her Majesty in light of living to our potential and finding purpose in what we do. As Queen, certainly, Elizabeth has an important job, a pinnacle of importance and influence in this world. And what about me? Have I fulfilled my purpose? Or squandered my time, when I could have been doing something far more significant with my life? Does what I do really matter?
One of my heroes is Brother Lawrence, a monk who spent his life scrubbing pots in a kitchen and, later, when he was old, repairing worn-out sandals. Although these were the lowliest of jobs in the monastery where he served, Brother Lawrence realized through years of obscure ordinary work the countercultural impact of his relationship with God. When he entered the monastery in Paris in 1638 at the age of 24, he felt called to do great things for God. He despised ordinary work, and I suppose, he was dismayed when he was assigned the washing of dishes for the next 30 years. But amidst the grunge of a kitchen in the 1600s, God worked on his heart and Brother Lawrence devoted himself to do everything there with excellence for the love of God – no matter what. So it was not the WHAT he did that motivated him, but he saw his work as a form of worship and love for God. Even that which seemed lowly, puny and obscure in the eyes of men became a vehicle for Brother Lawrence to live on a deeper level a life that saw from God’s perspective what in reality is truly significant and profound.
In Practicing the Presence of God, a book compiled of his writings after his death in 1691, Lawrence writes, "Nor is it needful that we should have great things to do. . .We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of Him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before Him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God."
Brother Lawrence saw the tremendous value in what the world saw as mundane, and God changed him as a result. "I began to live as if there were no one save God and me in the world… The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen and while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.” Work was a means of worship.
When God is not the sole focus of our lives and the core of who we are, we HAVE to seek recognition and accomplishment in the world, because there is a huge gaping HOLE in our hearts, a hole that only God can fill, no matter how hard and how much we try to stuff to fill up the emptiness. The world promises performance will fill that sense of purpose, but instead God reveals that it is grace. It is only when He fills us that we will be fulfilled. What we do is not significant in itself, but a profound outpouring of His love within. There are no insignificant things in the eyes of God, no menial tasks done in His Name.
I often feel so little in the things that I do, in light of the important things that others do. And then I realize that my fulltime job is faithfulness to God. In God’s eyes, serving Him is the ultimate privilege of being a child of the King. When done with excellence and in His name, there is as much significance in scrubbing pots and pans or cleaning bathrooms in God’s perspective as in being the Queen of England.
It is not how we look at it. But how God does.
My mother grew up in a family that struggled financially. When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, hard times became even harder. They scraped along doing without, but more importantly, doing with what they had. Nothing was wasted. Something worn out and broken? – well, there was some use for it. Mom’s life was further complicated when her father became disabled and died during the Depression, while she was a teenager. And so, very early in her life, my mother’s motto became “When you have a lemon, make a lemonade.” When difficulties arose, when disaster struck, when life seemed to take a wrong turn onto a dead-end road, she learned to just look at the situation from a different perspective and let God redeem it. Over and over again, I heard her say those words.
I thought of my mom yesterday, while visiting my daughter Kat who lives in Nashville. As a physician, she has learned to maximize the tightest pockets of time. She was able to come home briefly yesterday midday between the clinic and hospital. She quickly stirred up an angel food cake mix to be served for dessert at supper. She popped the cake pan into her little countertop oven. Before she left, the cake had risen and was burning, stuck to the burners on the top of the oven. She rescued the pan, scraped off the charred shell on top, and opened the windows to let out the heavy sweet smoke that had now pervaded the kitchen. We preheated the regular oven to finish baking what remained. She left for work, and I was left to take the cake out of the oven when it appeared to be done.
The buzzer rang, I removed the pan. So far, so good. Then I made the big mistake of following the instructions. The box said to invert the bundt pan on a glass bottle to let the angel food cake cool. But as soon as I turned the pan over, the cake fell out in big hot steamy chunks. I quickly scooped the cake onto a plate as best as I could. And I watched the cake deflate into what appeared to be a rather pathetic version of funnel cake – a flat sugary confection served at carnivals.
This cake was refusing to be made. I tried to think of something else we could serve. But when Kat heard about the dilemma, she didn’t skip a beat. She moved into catastrophe mode. It was like seeing my mom “making do,” as she used to say. Kat took what we had, tore the cake into little pieces, added some sliced strawberries and Cool Whip, and mixed it together. The result looked (and tasted) incredible, and no one was the wiser. Needless to say, there were no leftovers. Disaster was averted with a little creativity sprinkled on top.
“You’ve got to work with what you have sometimes,” she remarked with a smile.
God blesses and makes it enough. He redeems even the most impossible situations.
