One Saturday in the fall of the year I came across some Christian magazines that had lain around the house for months as I read an article here and one there. I had enjoyed them, but as I cleaned house that Saturday, I knew it was time to dispose of them.
It seemed a shame to throw out magazines that cost me $3.00 a piece and which could still give someone reading pleasure. I tried to think of someone to give them to but no one came immediately to mind. Then I saw an envelope addressed to my youngest sister with my first published article and graduation pictures in it. I kept intending to mail it but could never remember. I grabbed it, shoved the magazines in, and mailed them a few days later.
She called one evening some time later to thank me for the magazines and to question me. She told me she found a Post-it ã note stuck inside one of the magazines marking an article on anger, the topic for most of the articles in that particular issue.
“I told myself,” she said, “there must be something in this article that you wanted me to read. I read the whole article but I couldn’t figure out what you wanted me to see.”
A few days after she read it she went to Wednesday night service. She was surprised when her pastor preached on anger, and he even used some of the same scriptures in the article. “I went home and read that whole magazine and cried. I didn’t know I was an angry person,” she said. “I even took the quiz included in the magazine to see if I had a problem with anger. The more yes answers you had the more problems you had with anger.”
“How’d you do,” I asked.
“All my answers were yes,” she said.
There is a strange story about that Post-itã note she found. In college I learned that Post-itã notes make excellent bookmarks when you are doing research. You can jot down information on them to make finding particular topics easier. Since I always had these little yellow bits near to hand they often wound up in my pleasure reading as well. That Post-it ã was not an indication to pay special attention to that particular article but simply marked the last article I read.
When I told her this, we laughed together at her confusion. We also laughed at how God had to tell her twice that she had a problem. After we hung up, I laughed again, with joy at God’s amazing ability to use us without our even realizing it. I marveled at how God took several, seemingly random actions, a few useless magazines, and blended them together to make a lovely tapestry of blessing.
I once watched a program which showed how Hindu priests performed a religious, meditation ritual in which they took sand and created a huge floor sand painting called a mandala. It was amazing to watch the creation of this sand painting. The sand was colored in vibrant reds, greens, blues, golds, black and white. While on their knees, the priests took tubes of this sand and placed each color with painstaking precision, creating symbols and scenes relating to their religion. It took hours of back-breaking work to create and everything had to be exactly right. When completed, they swept up the sand in a precise manner and disposed of it. Hours of work, representing devotion to their gods, disappeared in a few moments and the sand could not be used again.
I nearly threw away those magazines. But God is into recycling, taking worn out lives or our junk and making a masterpiece. How amazing that I bought a magazine in the spring and received spiritual food and then, sent it to my sister in the fall just so God could get a message to her.
Only a few days before my sister called, I told God I didn’t feel I was any use to him at all. I wanted so much to do something but felt that I was useless, with nothing to do for Him. I wanted to feel that I was contributing something to Him, that something I did pleased Him. I wasn’t a Sunday School teacher, or musician, or missionary, or SOMEONE. I told myself “No one needs me. There is no work for me.”
Who implants the idea into our heads that the only ones who do something for God are those who sacrifice on the mission field, who preach to the lost, who teach Sunday School, sing in the choir, and do outreach visitation? Many believe that those without some actual, visible work are . . . failing God.
I believed that, too. I never considered the countless times I prayed on my way to school or work, for my family, my friends, and my personal failings as doing something for God. I thought the times I spent encouraging them was nothing to God. I never considered that God might use the small, ordinary things that people would never notice. I did not believe the Creator of the universe would consider such small things important. Aren’t spiritual strength and greatness marked by great deeds and abilities? The little I find to do seems so unimportant and somehow, beneath God’s notice.
Then I remember studying geology and the formation of various rocks and soils. I remember the first time I examined some beach sand under a microscope. We think of sand as simply tiny particles of quartz crystals, and it is. But in some places, such as the Caribbean, sand may have surprises. Just a handful of beach sand can be filled with tiny, microscopic shells, the skeletons of sea creatures, too tiny to see with the naked eye or even a simple magnifying glass. If you didn’t look through a microscope, you would never know they are there. Why would God care about such a tiny creature? What purpose could it serve if no one even knows it exist? I don’t know. But in the chain of life, it serves.
God looks at the world through a microscope and to Him, even the tiniest efforts are enormous. Hidden beneath what we see as apparently meaningless, little things may lie great works for God. My work may be hidden, even from me; but it is hidden only when viewed by normal sight.
© July, 1998 Cynthia I. Maddox
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