Significance
Jesus’ life was a balance between natural and supernatural. It’s not a stretch to assume the majority of his life was spent in small, ordinary ways. He was a man from a small town who learned a trade. The gospels are full of stories of the seemingly non-miraculous next to the miraculous. Jesus made blind men see, and he got thirsty and tired. He multiplied fishes and loaves, and he listened to his friends’ petty fights. He follows the Resurrection with breakfast by the sea.
Most of us would probably value being witnesses of the Resurrection over breakfast. We attach more purpose, more meaning, to signs and wonders. And when we think of our own purpose and meaning, wondering what God may do through us, we’ve been taught to have high expectations of what is to come. There is some incredible thing God can only do through me, and ‘incredible’ has come to mean exciting, adventurous, loud, world-changing. We started seeing some lives as fine and others as better. ‘Normal’ became a synonym for ‘insignificant.’
When we learn that God ‘calls’ people, we assume he calls them all to action. And we are ready to leap forward and accomplish, achieve, fight battles. Ambition becomes a virtue. What happens if he calls us to something quieter?
In the 1960s, a pastor named Gordon Cosby was leading a successful church in Washington DC and receiving invitations to speaking engagements all over the country. And while he was teaching discipleship and extending his church’s ministry, he was having trouble maintaining the local work of pastoring. As he was deciding how to go about this balancing act, he heard God’s call: Stay home and do your knitting. Stay home, and focus on the community God has put you in.
Knitting turns out to be pretty unexciting. For a pastor, it mostly included listening to people, praying with people, and paying attention to people. But that is how Cosby spent his life.
Members of his church, The Church of the Savior, one of the first interracial churches in then-segregated D.C., launched forty different mission groups and ministries in the city that are still active today. Without someone to tend the orchard, there would be no fruit.
Growth is healthy and necessary for life. Some ministries are meant to get bigger, some people are meant to leave for the ends of the earth. But in many ways, pride disguised as ambition teaches us to be discontent with where we are and the work we have before us. We’re unimpressed by the ordinary. And when we feel defeated by the ordinary and frustrating daily grind, it’s tempting to think that our gifts would shine brighter elsewhere, that I can’t be fulfilling my true purpose if there’s no sense of accomplishment.
What, actually, is it that Jesus asks us to do? What does he say our lives should be like?
After his resurrection, after he eats with his friends on the shore, Jesus asks Peter three questions and gives him three sets of instructions.
“After breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’
‘Yes, Master, you know I love you.’
Jesus said, ‘Feed my lambs.’”John 21:15
Feed my lambs. Take care of my sheep.
If we remain strict in our definition of what is sacred and what is not, of what is significant and what is just normal life, we miss the miracles in things like breakfast with friends. We miss the significance and goodness of simple, daily work. Christ is in all of it and holding all of it together. A backyard garden has the same meaning and beauty and mountaintops. Staying home to do your knitting has as much purpose, as much Christ, as any new, loud, or far away. The pressure we may feel to hear our calling, to find the place where we shine brightest, is largely put on by ourselves. What Jesus actually asks of us is to simply care for his sheep.