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We finally went back to school after winter break last week and let me tell ya that the alarm clock is no friend of mine. When the weekday alarm goes off it feels like I’m waking up in the darkest part of the middle of the night. But I’ve disciplined myself over the years to get up before my kids to spend some time in the Word.
So when I really did NOT want to get out of my bed, and found that I was in for three chapters of genealogy, this mama almost went back to sleep.
Almost.
If you are new around here, let me tell you my thoughts on these long (and boring) passages of scripture. I used to skip them all together. When I first started reading the bible on my own almost two years ago, I would pass over them without a second thought. But then God taught me something - in the middle of all of those foreign names I can’t pronounce.
Every life matters in His story.
They would count every person because every person counts. They listed out the names of the participants because it was important to the story, especially as it was being passed down from one generation to another. The names were not boring to them, they were incredibly significant.
Just like you and I are significant in His story.
So this time, as I started reading, I felt like I was done with the genealogy thing. I’d learned that lesson - so let’s go ahead and skip forward to the chapter with some action, mmmmkay?
But again, I felt a prompting to stop and take it all in.
So there I went reading about all the men and families present at the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem. I read about the families who volunteered to live within the walls and all of the families that lived in other parts of Judea. I read about the worship and and sacrifices that took place, the people signed the agreement with God to rededicate Jerusalem.
Seems pretty straight forward, right? It seems so, until I noticed something.
What stuck out to me in this particular listing of people is that there were so many different kinds. They listed the priests - which was common in these kinds of listings - but then he listed the singers “for the service of the house of God”. He listed what I assume to be farmers & shepherds, the gatekeepers, the men in the choir and the trumpeters. He listed the chief levites and the heads of the provinces.
There were all kinds of kinds.
We all have different roles to play in the story of eternity. We have different people to touch, different places to influence and different obligations to keep. Unfortunately some roles feel more impactful than others because of a stage, a giant social media following or a larger than life personality.
What cannot keep getting lost of us, on me, is that no matter how small a role we think we might play, every person that we touch for the kingdom is just as valuable as the next. I have to keep telling myself that it isn’t a competition - but Satan so desperately wants us to think that it is, right? Because when we think it’s a competition - who can impact the MOST people - then we tend to turn inward on each other!
God desires EACH and EVERY heart to be turned toward Him. He longs for EVERY woman, man, boy and girl to spend eternity with Him. And when we get focused on how MANY we lose sight of the value of the one.
Let us impact eternity one person at a time, one soul at a time, one heart at a time. Don't lose sight of the one today. Who can you touch today?