Sometimes I feel like my life doesn’t measure up to the men and women in the Bible. I read their stories of courage, of risk, of giving everything, and I feel far from that. My day to day life can be so mundane at times, so …. well….. normal. You know what I mean? I wonder if God is disappointed with how I live out my life, if I should be doing more.
In Acts 23 – 26 (which is today’s reading in the Amazing Race), Paul is arrested for sharing his story. There is a plot to kill him, he’s swept away by soldiers in the middle of the night, he speaks to a governor, and then to a king. He is in multiple meetings with rulers, and courageously shares his story over and over. He’s a rock star for the Kingdom, it seems to me.
Then I hit one little verse; Acts 24:27. It goes like this: “When two years had passed, Felix was succeeded by Porcius Festus, but because Felix wanted to grant a favor to the Jews, he left Paul in prison.” The following verse begins chapter 25 and the story runs on.
It’s the first five words of the verse that stood out to me: “When two years had passed…” Paul was left in prison for two years. It was
supposed to be a couple of weeks. It became a couple of years. What in the world did he do during that time? He did what all of us would do. He got up, ate, talked to anyone around, slept, and waited. He lived his day to day prison life. For two years. This is how Paul’s story flows. BIG story, BIG story, jump forward in time, BIG story, etc. These little jumps are so easy to miss. But the jumps make up most of Paul’s life. We really don’t know most of what he did. We have little peeks into the main stories, but the day to day stuff passes by in the verses, quietly, unnoticed. Normal, standard, day to day life.
It’s not that those days don’t matter. It was Paul’s faithfulness in those days, the time he spent reading, praying, listening, learning, talking, eating, walking, working that made him ready for the BIG stories that came up sporadically. It’s the same for us. Everyday is a BIG day for God. There are no wasted moments. We like the excitement, the BIG story we can tell to our kids. God likes faithfulness. Everyday. In the mundane. Faithfulness.
You don’t know when you are at the end of a “two year” period, where God is just about ready to unleash your next BIG story. We need to be faithful to what we have before us today.
Everyday matters. Don’t give up. Don’t quit.
It’s well worth the wait.
JasonChenoweth.com 