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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

The Big Audience

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Life in the workplace is probably one of the places where it is not so hard to feel one’s worth.  Just do your thing right; walk the extra mile; make your boss smile; come up with great ideas and execute well and you will be recognized and regarded as important for all your efforts and exceptional talents. It’s also easy to feel like you are making a huge difference in the world when you are in a big ministry with 200 people under your leadership and you are out there feeding the hungry, making Christ known and hugging weeping strangers who just lost their homes to an earthquake. Even as you are going through hard times in your service for God and people, you can look forward to sharing a glorious testimony and see a twinkle in people’s eyes because you have again inspired them to make the best choices in life despite all its difficulties.

Yet it is another story when God takes you to another journey when you no longer have a big audience. This is the season when your biggest ministry is reduced to one or two people and to a cat, a dog and a few chickens and rabbits. This is when you can’t give in to your food cravings to protect the growing life inside you – and yes, that is a thankless job in the meantime and sometimes, what you get is a kick instead or a heart burn and sudden shortness of breath. While before you would spend three hours designing a curriculum for high school kids feeling like a catalyst for societal change in the process, you are now spending three hours keeping the house together and thinking of ways to move things forward. Sometimes, that means googling an interesting recipe, engaging in it for an hour but coming up with something entirely different. Sometimes that means feeling happy you got the fire going and realizing later that you were not supposed to build fire in the first place because 65 degrees is not cold enough for others.

When you think you just moved mountains by moving one piece of furniture, but there is deafening silence rather than a round of applause but you think it’s ridiculous to post about it on Facebook, you get tempted to doubt whether it’s worth it to move mountains in the first place. Yet, I realized that when I hear no words or when I don’t see my name in the paper, that’s when the voice of God should be loudest. I realized that in everything I do, I can glorify Him– whether it’s teaching gerund phrases to high school kids or making sure I don’t burn the house down.  It is humbling to be a housewife and a mother – but God considers it a great calling. What a big audience does not see, God sees. What 200 people do not hear, God hears. God is my biggest audience. (Jill Christianae Robinson)