Because ONE Matters

We started up our Bible study again last night. The first meeting of 2017 found all of us gathered around a kitchen island, drinking coffee, trying tiramisu, and sampling a {very delicious} cheeseball. And then we gathered in the living room to break open An Unexplainable Life and look again at the book of Acts and the life of the early church.

I don't know what it was like weather-wise in your world yesterday, but it was just cold, windy, rainy, nastiness here. It was tempting to crawl under a blanket and just stay home, but when you lead the Bible study, you can't exactly do that, so I went, and I'm sure glad I did. Isn't it just how it usually goes when God brings the biggest blessings out of the nights when you are most tempted to skip?

We studied Acts 8, which includes the account of Philip taking a bit of a detour and finding the Ethiopian Eunuch who was struggling to understand the words he studied as he read his scrolls.

Out of all the accounts that are shared in Scripture - which are not plentiful, if you stop and think about how many actually occurred - this one made it into the pages. This one moment in time when one man took a significant geographical detour and ended up running into one other man who needed to have an explanation of the Gospel. He had the words in front of him but he didn't understand them.

You know why I love this so much? (And this is what we talked about at Bible study last night.) We're conditioned to believe our efforts matter most when they touch a HUGE group. How can we change the world? How can we impact the greatest number of people at one time? And somehow that teaches us (intentionally or unintentionally) that if we're not doing the biggest and the best, we're not mattering at all.

And yet right here in the middle of the Bible itself is this story of ONE PERSON ministering to ONE PERSON and from that, God did huge things.

It's hard to be content with little, isn't it? But little matters just as much as big. And sometimes it matters more than big.

This blog isn't a big blog. I've been here ten years, and I don't have ten thousand readers a day. And I know some people popped on the blogging scene last month and already have a far more "successful" outcome than I do. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because I trust God to bring the people to this little page every day that need to see it. And if my job right now isn't to have a big blog, I need to be content with the small page He's allowed me, and be faithful to do my job here every day, knowing that each one who reads here matters.

Maybe your world is filled with small too: small churches, small classes, small book sales, small interest in whatever matters most to you. And maybe you've been conditioned to believe that small = failure. But it doesn't. One matters when God's running the show. And perhaps He has put you on a whole detour right now for the sake of ONE.

Be faithful to your one (or two or three).

After all - if you were the one, wouldn't you want to matter too?