The Story of Faith

I am one of those who owes a debt to the church which is so great it can never be measured.  The church has had a hand in shaping my life even before I was born.  A small Methodist Church out in the middle of nowhere was a place which provided ministry for my mother as a young girl.   When I was growing up she was the one who made sure my sister and I went to Sunday School and to church.  And later when my father died, we returned to that same church and to its cemetery where he was buried.  Only as an adult did I find out that this small insignificant church was established on grounds given by a great grandfather a very long time ago.    

As I reflect back over my time of going to this family church as a boy, I am amazed at how stories that cannot be imagined unwind into a new reality.  There was a line of preachers who served that church and a countryside full of lay men and women who helped write the story that has had shaping power on my own life.  Of course, mine was not the only one shaped by their faithfulness, I am simply one of many.  None of them could have imagined how the things they did which might have been regarded as mundane sustained a church and enabled it to have an influence that reached far into the future.  

What we often forget in the day to day life of faith which seems filled only with the ordinary is that even as our story is being written it is becoming a part of a larger story that is being used by the Father to bring new life to His Kingdom.  In the midst of the ordinary, God has a way of doing extraordinary things.  The influence our faith is having is something to which most of us give no thought, but what is being done through our lives as a faith response is not lost on the One who has called us.  He is using the current part of our story as a means to writing a story which is being lived out in persons unknown to us.