Merry Thirteenth Day of Christmas—Delivering God’s Gifts, Part 2

Another way God delivers His gifts is by producing extraordinary and unexpected good from our ordinary work.

Yesterday we saw how Joseph’s and Daniel’s diligent, God motivated, work in their secular vocations delivered God’s goodness by providing tangible benefits to many people. Those benefits were very important in of themselves, but weren’t the half of it. 

We now know, in hindsight, that their humble diligence put them in positions to deliver God’s goodness to millions/billions more people through their parts in salvation history. They probably had no inkling of it at the time, but their faith filled attention to their day-to-day work produced eternal impact.

 God is very good at that—deriving extraordinary good from the ordinary, but faithful, work of His people.  That might be what St. Paul was getting at that when wrote that God’s power “working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine” Ephesians 3:20 (New Jerusalem Bible).

We have a powerful example of that through another saint, also named Paul. The UALC Garden started out on a relatively small patch of ground on UALC’s Mill Run campus, and after a couple of seasons was showing promise. However, UALC had an opportunity to retire some debt by selling the larger parcel of land containing the garden. Paul Ulring, UALC’s senior pastor at the time, worked very hard to get that done, while at the same time taking care that the relatively insignificant garden ministry continue in another spot.  In other words, he faithfully attended to the duties of the position God put him in. That did tangible good for UALC as a whole (putting its finances in order) and for the garden in particular (we ended up with more land in a better spot).

But God did far more through that than I think Paul expected. Paul’s taking care to look out for the garden in the midst of the much larger land sale project ended up exponentially enhancing the garden’s impact. Not only did it increase our capability to feed the hungry, it started a chain of events (too long to explain here) giving the garden an additional focus: blessing refugees from distressed parts of the world.  In short, God’s love is being delivered in a qualitatively different—and arguably more powerful—way than anyone expected when Paul was working so hard on the land sale.  That is only happening because of Paul’s diligent, God honoring, work.

That directly parallels how God worked through Joseph and Daniel. As in those cases, God placed a very good man in a position of responsibility. As in those cases, that good man diligently, effectively, and gracefully performed the duties of his position. As in those cases, significant tangible good resulted. And as in those cases, God also derived different, and greater, good than His faithful servant likely expected at the time.

So what do we do with that, how do we respond? We keep faithfully doing what God called us to, trusting that He “working in us, [will] do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”