The Most Important Place for You to Be

The place to be on this muggy Friday morning wasn't at a job, the mall, the gym, or at the coffee shop catching up with a close friend.  Then again, the place to be on any given day isn't always the most popular, seemingly most important place to be.  Instead, it's anywhere God is at work.

That place might be the sidewalk, the checkout line at the grocery store, a gas pump at the fueling station on the corner, or even a public bathroom.

The location is not as important as what God is doing there. Where God is at work, that is the place to be.

For me today, that place was the foyer of a church so small my dad actually passed it up and had to make a u-turn to double back.  That place was a room overflowing with hundreds of Ziploc bags, all filled with the same list of items--deodorant, body lotion, 20 oz bottles of conditioning shampoo, toothpaste, a single ink pen, one white pair of socks, an individually packaged toothbrush and single bars of soap.

At a quarter till ten, the bags and boxes covered the assembly line of tables splitting the room's center and had begun to spill over onto the floors.  Still, the door kept opening to reveal more women carrying in bag after bag, box after box brimming with donations until there were only small paths left to walk between.

These women had gathered from different churches around south Louisiana for the sole purpose of packing some of the 1400 boxes to be used to minister to our state's women's prison next weekend.

The work didn't take immense bodily strength nor great intelligence.  It required no knowledge of prophecy or other Biblical theology.

It simply required willing bodies and hearts bent towards serving God and fulfilling Christ's command in Matthew 25 by ministering to a particular population in need of Christ's mercy and grace. 

Some women put together white paper boxes; some folded their lids.  Others checked to ensure the items were the proper size and transferred them from bag to box while another group put on the lids and moved them to a wooden pallet where they were stacked into a cube, then wrapped securely in clear plastic.

In about an hour, we packed 459 boxes before praying God's blessing over them.

Each box that was assembled represented someone's sacrifice in Jesus' name.  Before today, someone had sacrificed his or her personal time and money to purchase the items. Some of the women present today even sacrificed one of their vacation days just to be there to help out.

Being where God is at work takes sacrifice.  But what any woman there would tell you is the blessing they received from the giving far exceeded what little they gave.

What I'm learning is that the most important place for you and me to be may appear to be the least important place to be.  Yet, in God's economy, he turns everything on its head, changing the least into the most, the small into the great ,the weak into the strong.

Seeking out the small, seemingly insignificant places to fulfill the mission Christ has called us to do just might lead to some thing, some place larger than ourselves.

"For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me" (Matt. 25:35-36).