A Grain of Sand ... A Ripple ... Beauty from Ashes

Someone knocked on the gate of our zaguán, our open car port. "Can I help you?" I asked the lady at the gate. Her face broke out in a radiant smile. "Hermana Janine? Don't you recognize me?"

Yes, I was Hermana Janine (Sister Janine) but I definitely did not recognize the woman before me. When she identified herself, my jaw dropped. I could not believe my eyes. The young girl I had known in a rural village in central Mexico was now all grown up, married to a pastor, and having heard that I worked in the ministry in this northern city in Mexico, she had set out to find me. She and her husband had a church nearby and were interested in the Bible school we worked with. Several young people from their church had expressed a desire to attend.

Later, as we fellowshipped a little, the young pastor's wife blessed me with a nugget of truth of which I had not been aware. Her desire to serve the Lord had been fomented by my teaching the children in the village where her father's church had been. Now, several years later, here we were. Connecting and intertwined again through ministry.

How I ended up serving at her home church is a long, convoluted story that began with my renewed commitment to the Lord in my high school years. In a gut reaction to the great pain that drew me to the Lord, I made a heartfelt vow to God. "Lord, if there is ever a way you can use me to teach children Your ways, not just the stories in the Bible, but Your ways, I'm Your girl!" If there was any way to help even one child avoid the pain I had walked through, the pain resulting from doubting God because of ignorance of His ways, I wanted to offer myself for God to use.

I soon learned that God will take you at your word. He opened a wonderful door for me to minister to children as I worked side by side with my great aunt on a Christian magazine in Mexico.

Back in the day, Christian magazines in the Spanish language were few and far between. Although not prolific by modern standards, only 35,000 a printing in its heyday, an informal survey of the readership of "our" magazine found that on average each individual magazine ran through eight sets of hands. Some more, some less. Because of her position as editor of the magazine, Auntie was often asked to minister in different places where the magazine was read. And, as her sidekick, her companion and helper in the ministry, many times I had the opportunity to minister to the children at those places. It was a glorious fulfillment of that heartfelt promise made to God.

Now here, many years later, I was once again connected to a young lady from that far away time. All I had been doing was serving, teaching children God's Word, grateful for an opportunity to share God's ways with little ones. And yet, now I was living unintended consequences. My little grain of sand, the itsy bitsy little bit I could do for God, had touched a life, had made a ripple, had been part of the prompting that led a wonderful young woman to serve the Lord in her own right. And her "tiny" ripple had in turn touched many other lives ...

Wouldn't you know it? Some of the most exemplary Bible students during my days with the Bible school came from the church that young woman and her husband pastored. Young people who were disciplined, hungry for God's Word, outstanding in every way. One little grain of sand. One little ripple. But God used it in a glorious way to further His kingdom.

We see such ripples scattered throughout the pages of the Bible. We see Rahab, a harlot, offering protection to spies sent by God's children. The ripples from that "small" act? The physical salvation of her family, her own spiritual salvation as a gentile allowed to embrace Judaism, and, many generations later, her induction into the hallowed genealogy of Jesus Christ. We see Jochebed, a Jewish mother forming a resistance of one to Pharoah's cruel order to throw her baby in the Nile, there to drown or be devoured by crocodiles. Instead, she built a basket lined with waterproofing bitumen and pitch and, in blind faith, placed her child in the very river that was supposed to be a death sentence. And ripples there were. The child, found and adopted by an Egyptian princess, was trained in the art of war and all things important to Egyptian royalty. Yet this child, weaned from the breast of his Jewish mother, turned his back on all things Egyptian, all things that gave him a life of privilege and ease, to identify with God's people—to lead them out of Egypt. Quite a ripple, indeed. We see Elizabeth, year in and year out, offering up seemingly fruitless prayers about her barren womb. We see an angel announcing the answer to her prayers, her blessed pregnancy, and we see a child brought up in the ways of Yahweh, turning his back to the corruption and greed rampant in the ministry in his time, to serve as a bold prophet and forerunner to the Messiah. His name? John the Baptist.

Little ripples. Unseen actions not shouted from the rooftops, but reaching out through the years to give glory to His Name.

Never, ever, ever let yourself think that your living for God doesn't matter. Never, ever think that the "little" things you do, those quiet unseen acts of kindness or faith, are unimportant. Well did Hagar name the place of her deliverance, "Well of the Living One Who Sees Me" (Genesis 16). Those little grains of sand, those "small", those "insignificant", those unseen, things we do for God, are seen by the One Who Matters, and they will produce beauty—maybe not tomorrow or next year, but be assured that in due season they will produce glorious, rich, spiritual fruit. The ashes of yesteryear will seed your life to give way to glorious unexpected beauty, the very glory of God.

"And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not" (Galatians 6:9).

"But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Sprit of the Lord" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

"To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes ... that He might be glorified" (Isaiah 61:13).