It was one of those mornings only parents of preschoolers can understand. No, you can’t have chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. No, you can’t hit your sister with your stick horse—or your book, or the fire truck, or the remote control. No hitting your sister with anything! Crayons are for paper, not the wall. You can jump on the trampoline, not the couch. And stop hitting your sister!
We made it through to naptime by sheer force of will. The oldest settled in with a book. The middle child retreated to his room still mumbling his discontent. The youngest went through her routine of screaming “No nap!” for ten minutes before sliding into exhausted slumber. I finally dropped into my favorite rocker, Bible in hand.
“Lord,” I whispered, “I need to hear from you now.” The quiet fell like a slow rain on parched soil. Soothed, I listened for God’s voice in the silence. And then the Lord spoke.
Go color with your son.
It wasn’t the word from the Lord I wanted to hear. I had a few precious moments to spend in Bible study and prayer, and the Lord wanted me to go color? I wanted to hear something else from the Lord. Something profound. Important. Impressive. I was looking for earthquakes and lightning bolts. Instead I got crayons. Terrific.
Grudgingly, I slipped into my son’s room. He looked up from his coloring book and eyed me warily.
“Why are you in here, Mom?”
“I just wanted to color with you for a little bit. Is that okay?”
“Sure. You can color the dinosaur orange.”
As we sat together coloring an orange dinosaur against a purple sky, I realized the moment was what we had needed to repair the relationship after the morning’s battle. God’s word for me that afternoon was simple, but it was also right.
[Tweet “God specializes in doing miracles with acts of simple faith”]
That experience made me realize how often I had been missing God’s word to me. We listen for blaring trumpets, but God often speaks to us in a gentle whisper. In the book of Zechariah God warns us not to “despise the day of small things” (Zechariah 4:10). After the exile the Israelites returned to their homeland and began to rebuild the temple. It seemed so small compared to the former glory of Solomon’s temple, but God would use their small beginning to spread his glory throughout the earth. When we dream of significance, God’s quiet promptings can seem irrelevant. But God specializes in doing miracles with acts of simple faith.
[Tweet “We serve a God who transforms simple obedience into supernatural encounters”].
We serve a God who transforms simple obedience into supernatural encounters.He takes a few loaves of bread and feeds 5000 people. God takes a shepherd boy and makes him a king; a fisherman and makes him a fisher of men. God looks not for extraordinary courage but for simple faithfulness that becomes extraordinary in his hands. So often those promptings to write the note, take the soup, or make the phone call come from him. If we wait to hear God’s command to do something spectacular someday, we risk missing the power he wants to imbue our lives with today.
My goal in this season of life is to listen for God’s quiet promptings. What does God want me to do now, in this moment? Who does he want me to encourage? How does he want me to show love? I’m learning not to wait for the stories I want to tell my grandchildren about. My job is simply to be obedient as God writes the story. What can God do with simple faith?