Working on our own "little room"

Another great post this morning from Ron Edmonson, which speaks to the need for us to keep our own role in God's Plan in perspective. He points out that a honeybee only produces 1/12 tsp. of honey in its lifetime while, in conjunction with all the other bees in the hive, turns out a prodigious amount of honey.

The trick is that the bee knows what its job is and does it to the best of its ability. It shoulders its own burden and doesn't try to take on anyone else's -- like, it doesn't try to lay eggs or become the queen bee.

(DIGRESSION ALERT: this could turn into the stuff of a sappy children's book if I'm not careful: the little bee that wanted to be queen. Except, well, it was a male ... and, well, it didn't know that if another queen came along in the hive, Bob the Kindly Beekeeper came along and ruthlessly killed the new queen to prevent the bees from swarming and flying off to form a new hive and terrorize Bob's neighbors in the process, causing the neighbors to descend on Bob's beehives with axes and flame-throwers ......

Sorry, slipped over to the "dark side" for a moment there. Must by my German heritage -- the same culture that brought us Max und Moritz, before they became "sanitized" as the Katzenjammer Kids ....)

Back to the bees ...

As I read it, Ron is saying that as workers in any effort, we need to lose the word "only" from our vocabulary. We need to understand that so long as we are doing our job, we can be satisfied and proud of that 1/12th tsp. we produce, because it's part of a whole that is so much bigger.

A couple of years ago, a brother at Gospel Mission asked about Ezekiel 40 -- the description of The City. He wondered why the prophet goes into such intricate detail about the little rooms and the chairs and the palm trees and other carvings. Meditating on that, we start to see a parallel to our own walk. Ezekiel is never shown the "30,000-foot view" of the entire project.

He does the same thing with Noah, by the way: never actually shows him a picture of what the ark is supposed to look like at the end; same with Moses and the instructions for the Tabernacle.

There's a good reason for that. As human beings, we want to be responsible for the entire project: we want to Do Big Things, and if God showed us the overall picture of what He was going for, somebody (or maybe all of us) would come along and cut corners to produce what only looked like the overall picture. But you know something would be missing.

In the same way, He gives intricate instructions as to what we are supposed to do. That way, we don't embellish -- like adding a kangaroo between the cherubim -- and don't fall into pride. We also come to trust Him to bring it all together, because He knows that 30,000' view.

We also "stick to our knitting" and don't try to shoulder someone else's burden. God gives us enough as it is, and we have to remember that we can only be "unprofitable servants" -- the best we can do for God is break even, because if we tried to do anything more for Him, we'd be saying that His instructions to us weren't good enough.

I needed that revelation because we were opening up The Lord's Rain at the time -- just about 3 years ago, now -- and one morning, I was standing outside the Mission looking at the scene on the street. We look right into the teeth of one of the worse alleys in Vancouver for drugs and crime (possibly the worst, although the one beside the Carnegie Center gives it some stiff competition).

So I said to the Lord, "look at all this: the drugs and the crime and the mental illness and the homelessness ... how can we fix that?" And He said, "and your job is to run the showers program. Don't worry: you stick to that and see where it goes. I'll bring the others together."  

                                                             

And that's never left me. And rather than let me despair, God has shown me remarkable things with lives turning around; all because I was "just" running a showers program and preaching the Gospel. And I'm confident my 1/12th tsp. is part of a far bigger picture.

By the way, there's nothing wrong with Doing Big Things: so long as they're the Big Things God calls you to do. Peter wanted to Do A Big Thing -- defend Jesus. But Jesus had just told him he'd be the rock His church would be built on. That's a Really Big Thing. Peter's church stands to this day (and I don't mean the Catholic church), but when he did what he thought he was supposed to do -- take a sword and attack one of the soldiers -- he missed and only got the ear. And Jesus healed that.

I believe it's OK to let God know that one is willing to do more; but we need to be stick with the job we're given in the mean time.