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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)
