“Thank you, thank you for saying that! God sent you to me today!” she said with the intensity of a proclamation, and stopped in the middle of her work-out to give me a tearful hug. I was dumbfounded. Really? The music picked us up again and we kept pounding out the beat while my mind wondered over our conversation, looking for the words that meant so much to her, and all I could think of was what a humble blessing when God uses you unaware.
I knew her only casually, as another mom-of-young-adults, a bond that made us look for one another through the crowd at the gym, and ask about our fledglings occasionally. Today we happened to be the only two there in a lull of activity and before I knew it a question about who would be home over Easter turned into a heart-spilling of anxious concern for decisions being made, and all I did was share what I am learning: that the burden isn’t ours to carry any more, that God is faithful to work in our daughters’ lives as He has always done for us. Truth that bolsters my heart, and shouldn’t His goodness be shared? Such a small thing to offer, multiplied to abundance received by His Spirit.
It never ceases to amaze me how God puts the puzzle pieces together, and how He turns His making of us into blessing for others, so that the struggles of one heart can encourage another, all of us woven together in unexpected ways, and His Resurrection life still flowing outward from the Cross. It is the mysterious way the Body of Christ works when each part is fitted together as He chooses, each part different but necessary, and Him the Head. It is how we share the Good News with others– just living in His grace and telling what He is doing in our own hearts, because other hearts are hungry in ways we don’t even know.
We sing that old song with the children upstairs on Sunday mornings, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” and maybe we need to bring it downstairs to the men and women too. Who knows how God might use each willing part of the Body to pour out this Resurrection Life everywhere?
“My future hangs on this: You make preciousness from dust,
Please don’t stop creating me…
Oh, Your cross, it changes everything…”
(Second Chance, Rend Collective Experiment)