So many of us spend so much time thinking about, praying through, and searching for the plan of God for our lives. Milestones tend to bring this on—graduating high school, graduating college, preparing to get married, multiple years at a job—all of these things really make us think. We only get one life. We get one chance to live in this world that God made, one chance to see it, one chance to contribute to it. That’s so exciting, but it’s also so much pressure. 

I think some of this is unique to our generation. Never before have you ever had the whole world at your fingertips. In 24 hours, if you wanted to and had the resources to make it happen, you could start a life on the other side of the world. You could move to Morocco tomorrow, have Google Translate to help you speak to people, and in a few days, probably find a place to live. You could take out a loan and buy a car, you could move states away to college, you could buy a plane ticket to New York City for the day—you really could. Some of that, really, wouldn’t even be that hard to do. But at the same time, that means you could also pursue any job of the hundreds or thousands to choose from. You could live in any city, in any state. You could probably date and potentially marry many different people if the circumstances were right, and any one of these decisions could impact the entire course of the rest of your life. Terrifying, right? If you’re an over-analyzer like me, the number of options is both exciting and completely paralyzing. Our great-grandparents, even our grandparents, really didn’t have those options—they knew their immediate community and the opportunities they could hear or read about; they had the job options right in front of them, and they knew the people in their town or maybe a town over. Their options, for better or worse, were just more limited than ours. 

We want to do great things for God. We so desperately want to please him, to honor him, to build something that matters in the kingdom. But what do we do when the thing God calls us to feels small? We write a blank check with our lives, we live with open hands, and God calls us to what feels, well, kinda insignificant. When we’ve dreamed of doing great things for God, what do we do with “small” things? 

The Old Testament, typically, isn’t the place I go for immediate answers. The New Testament is full of answers for all of life’s questions—it tells us how to act in light of the Gospel, how to pursue holiness, how to treat our neighbor—but not as much in the Old Testament. But really, the Old Testament is a book of narratives about people who walked with God. It’s the most accurate depiction of human nature that you’ll find, full of broken people who were trying their best to limp towards a God they wanted to please but didn’t fully understand. And isn’t that, in the end, the same thing we are doing? 

Consider Joseph.. He was the obvious favorite in a group of 12 brothers, and the youngest, who kept telling his brothers about all of his dreams in which they bowed down to him. Unfortunately for Joseph, the frustration and jealousy this produced in his brothers led them to leave him for dead and sell him to the Egyptians to become a slave. Joseph, put in a horrible position, ends up in the house of a powerful man named Potiphar. In this house, the favor of God rests on Joseph’s life and he rises through the ranks of leadership until he is the head of Potiphar’s house. He is then wrongfully imprisoned, where he serves and leads inside the prison by interpreting the prisoners’ dreams and speaking on God’s behalf. One of these prisoners eventually becomes a direct servant to Pharaoh, remembers Joseph in times of trouble, and calls on Joseph to interpret Pharaoh’s dream. Pharaoh is so impressed by his interpretation that he appoints Joseph as his right-hand man over all of Egypt. The household leadership, the favor of God, the interpretation of dreams, and Joseph’s faithfulness to God result in the salvation of not just Joseph’s life but the lives of Joseph’s family. So much of Joseph’s story teaches us about Jesus, but so much of Joseph’s story is God weaving together bits and pieces of what seemed random, unfortunate, or trying to build the character and skillset of a person God wanted to use mightily for His glory. 

 

Consider also David. David was just a child when a man named Samuel, a prophet of God, came to his house and told him that one day, David would be king over all of Israel. When we read the story of David, most of us assume that David went that day right into the palace and sat on the throne. In reality, David went right back to being a shepherd. Every night, sleeping with the sheep in the grass and the mud and fighting off predators to his sheep, but with the calling in his heart to rule a nation. When the time came for David to fight Goliath, was it the calling to the throne that made him capable of killing the giant? No—it was his years of training as a shepherd. He killed Goliath, not with the potential of his reign, but with the skills he developed in being faithful to a lowly calling. When David was invited into the throne room, he probably assumed that was his moment—but Saul, the current king, just wanted David to play the harp for him. David sat in the throne room every day, and think of what he saw! He saw a man making decisions for a nation, ruling with military power, leading his household and his subjects—the very thing God called him eventually to do. When David did eventually take Saul’s throne, he was a great king. But David was a great king because God was preparing David in the pasture, long before David knew God’s plan for his life. 

 

I can see God’s preparation in my story, too. I was called to ministry when I was 12. I know this in hindsight, really, because 12-year-old-me didn’t have the language for that kind of call yet. I was sitting in my home church during our missions conference. I remember their stories of risk for the sake of the Gospel. I remember absolutely loving it. 

 

I sat in the Saturday evening service with my childhood best friend, whose family had spent lengths of time overseas. I have no recollection of who was preaching, but the text was Isaiah 61. It reads like this: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives…” (Isaiah 61:1-3). It’s a prophetic passage about the ministry of Jesus—the ministry that He would eventually entrust to us (Matt 28:18-20). It felt like everything around me went quiet, and the Spirit of God laid that calling right before me. I was to do as He did. That’s all I knew at that point. 

Years later, as my personality, gifts, and interests developed, I figured out I was good at words. I didn’t really care to say them out loud or in front of people, but I was good at understanding them. I was also good at writing them. In high school, that meant I was really good in my English classes. So I went to college thinking that I wanted to help people, and I was good at English, so I studied to be an English teacher. I did all my classroom experience in a low-income school, really loved my students, and thought I would do that for the rest of my life. My mom and dad both worked at school—my dad is a teacher—and both sets of my grandparents were teachers. But the more time I spent in the classroom, the less I enjoyed the actual teaching. My most problematic students—the fighters, the late to class, the disengaged ones—all of them had to leave my class and go somewhere else to talk to someone else. But they were the ones I felt the most called to. I wanted to know them and help them; I just didn’t want to be their teacher. Through three very specific and random phone calls, I changed my major to English and got on a plane to spend 3 months overseas that summer, to be followed by seeing Gospel work in 7 different countries since the Lord led me to that decision. I now work at a local church where I see the winds of revival stirring in the next generation of students every week. I write curriculum for them in the same format and with the same education that I received studying to be a teacher. The writing I had a passion for as a child, I now do full-time. The passion I have for evangelism I now get to pour into my students. In every season of my life, and even more so in the ones I didn’t understand, I see the kindness of God to orchestrate my life to accomplish his purposes, even when I was clueless. 

So what do we do? This doesn’t mean that we are passive, content to let things happen to us and cite God’s sovereign control so we don’t have to work hard. But it does mean that we hold our plans loosely. It does mean that we trust in God’s heart when we can’t see His hand. It means that when God ruins your best-laid plans, or when the task in front of you doesn’t make any sense, we serve a God who turns prisoners into rulers and shepherds into kings. Nothing—and I mean nothing—is wasted when it is done to God’s glory. There is an old hymn called “Little is Much When God is In It” that goes like this: 

 

“Does the place you’re called to labor

Seem so small and little known? 

Well, it is great if God is in it

And He will not forsake His own. 

Little is much when God is in it

Labor not for wealth or fame

There’s a crown, and you can win it

It you go in Jesus’ name.”

 

Little is much when God is in it. If you are waiting on the Lord to do the things he has promised, or if you feel like you have been entrusted with something too small, it is your faithfulness to Jesus—not your impressiveness—that qualifies you for great things. Trust Him, and do well.