Here’s the picture, it is Halloween and I am on a couch at home alone with the exception of my 2 year old niece asleep in the next room. Oh and it is only 8 pm.
It takes about 3 minutes of silence for me to start thinking about the fact that I am lonely. I am living in a new state, I am by myself on Halloween, and I am doing absolutely nothing of significance right now with my life. This spirals into the fact that I just had the most amazing, adventurous and highly significant year on the race, yet now I am temporarily without purpose. The lies just kept coming.
One of the things I heard from AIM staff and our alumni squad leaders was that the race was not going to be the best thing we did in our lives. They had a vision that the race was just a starting point for the Lord to continue to do even greater things through us. This quickly became my vision too and I believe it and desire it with all of my heart. However, times like this, I start to question if God has a desire for the same thing.
I feel insignificant. I feel purposeless, useless, dispensable, and foolish for thinking that God is going to do something bigger with me. So yeah, I am crying, you know..kind of a lot and I don’t want to actually read my Bible so I decide to look at what I was reading this time last year. The closest I got was November 1st where ironically I was reading about my favorite name in the Bible (apart from any names of the Trinity, of course) which is Gideon. (Here I should just insert that I want to marry a Gideon, so if that is you, let me know). Anyway, the Gideon of the book of Judges was sitting in a winepress beating wheat when the angel of the Lord came to him. This is not only one of the most ordinary tasks of that day, but he was also hiding out of fear of the Midianites. Nonetheless, he is addressed as a “mighty man of valor”! That is so rad! I did not relate to this last year in this way and I am so thankful that the Lord reveals different things to us at different times.
Gideon was performing a very insignificant task when we first hear about him and he was probably living a seemingly insignificant life until this point. YET, God speaks to him, through the angel, as a mighty man of valor! God doesn’t recognize him for what he is doing, He doesn’t call him according to his actions or his fear, but He calls him according to what He is going to do in him. God sees Gideon not as the man on the floor of the winepress doing something ordinary. God sees Gideon as who He has called him to be and what He has made him for, a mighty man of valor. He knows Gideon’s potential and the significance placed on his life.
So even as I am alone on a couch, in all my ordinary and insignificant glory, God is still speaking over me what He is going to do in me. He is not looking at my ordinariness or my menial life. He is looking at me and calling me something extraordinary, speaking great significance into my life because that is His plan. Insignificance never applies as followers of Christ. Everything we are and do is seen from above as extraordinary because we are purposed by an extraordinary God, A God who has favorable and exciting plans for his children.
He is so full of grace to remind Gideon of who he is in truth and He is so full of grace to remind me of who I am in His truth. It probably won’t be exactly the words “mighty man of valor” but something close. The lie of insignificance is from a defeated enemy who is shaken because of what the Lord is going to use His sons and daughters for. The lie of insignificance has no power because God is going to call us to what He sees in us and what He is going to do in us. The lie of insignificance is weightless and it shrinks against the greater and better truth of our significance in our Father. He will be speaking His plans for you and I into existence, even as we are doing something mundane like sitting alone, on Halloween, without even a carved pumpkin…literally. He is so good.
