I’m a task-oriented person. I like to-do lists and the ability to cross things off of them. I like to be focused on a specific goal and working towards accomplishing it. Defined roles, detailed plans, and clear expectations are all my friends. I, in other words, am a friend of order and clarity.
Despite my affinity for these things, life doesn’t always reflect them. As history and science will tell us the world is in a constant state of atrophy. Things are naturally disposed to go from order to disorder unless some outside force acts upon them. This is true in nature, and it’s true in our lives as well. Chaos is bound to occur; we can do our best to manage it, but things will not always be as clear-cut as we may desire them to be.
Sometimes the hardest area for me to reconcile my desire for order with a state of uncertainty is in the area of ministry. In my mind, having clear expectations produces better results. However, ministry is not about crossing things off a to-do list but showing Christ’s love to other people. Because life is sometimes messy, so will ministry be. I may want to confine it to my carefully crafted plans, but God may have bigger and better expectations for what He has called me to do.
This was brought home to me recently as I went to serve at an event my church was having. I wasn’t originally scheduled to participate, and because I’m pregnant and it was an outside even on a hot day there was limited work that I could do. I wanted a concrete task; I was asked instead to simply hang out in a shaded area and greet people. While I was looking for clarity, the opportunity was ambiguous.
Yet as I stood there wrestling with whether I should go ask someone to give me something specific to do, I realized that serving God doesn’t always come with concrete measures of success. There was nothing for me to cross of the list that day – except whether or not I served God in such a way that it would please Him. Did I do the best with the opportunity that He had called me to? Did I greet people as if I was greeting Christ Himself? The task may have been ambiguous, but the expectation wasn’t. My goal needed to serve the people that came across my path as if my Lord and Savior was the one who was walking before me.
This is the same objective regardless of the clarity that we have in ministry. In whatever God has called us to do, our desire should be to use that opportunity to its fullest in order to bring God the most glory. The task may be small, but that doesn’t mean it’s significance in the Kingdom is. If God plants us somewhere, it’s because that is where He wants to use us. Our objective then should be to bloom wherever He plants – to make the most of every opportunity for His honor and renown.
When Christ was on this Earth He taught His disciples that what they did for the “least of these” was done unto Him (Mt. 25:40) When we have been given the opportunity to serve our focus shouldn’t be on the nature of the task but on the need of the people. If this is the case, if we are more concerned with demonstrating Christ’s love than we our with our own comfort and convenience, we can be confident that God is able to use the small seeds we may plant to grow something beautiful – in their lives and in our own.