For just as the body
is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are
one body, so it is with Christ…Indeed, the body does not
consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a
hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of
the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong
to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole
body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing,
where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in
the body, each one of them, as he chose.
- 1 Corinthians 12:12,
14-18
As
all the Longhorns, Aggies, Bears, Horned Frogs, Cougars, and Mean Green reading
this already know, it is officially college football bowl season. Players,
coaches, cheerleaders, and band members, to say nothing of students and alumni,
are traveling to locations as exotic as Honolulu and as—let’s just say ‘not
exotic’—as Albuquerque and El Paso for these games. Players will be lavished
with gifts from bowl committees, schools normally relegated to obscurity will get
their moment on national TV, and in the end, the winning schools will bring home
trophies to proudly display for years to come.
When
you think of these games, your mind probably goes immediately to the biggest
bowls, the ones played on New Year’s weekend like the Cotton Bowl, the Sugar
Bowl, and the granddaddy of them all, the Rose Bowl. But in the days prior to those big games with
national championship implications, there are smaller bowls for the teams who
squeaked in with winning records but no illusions of title contention. These
games lack the grandeur and tradition of the bigger bowls, and it shows in
their sometimes hilariously corporate names: the Redbox Bowl, the Belk Bowl,
and the Camping World Bowl, to name a few.
The
thing about these smaller bowls is that, despite their insignificance relative
to the national title, they can mean everything to the participants. For
example, while Alabama and Ohio State would sneer at an invitation to the Arizona
Bowl, New Mexico State could not have been happier to play in it last year—it
was their first appearance in a bowl game since 1960. Their matchup against
Utah State wasn’t one seen by millions; it wasn’t the kind of game you’d put at
the top of the marquee. But when New Mexico State triumphed in overtime,
guaranteeing them their first bowl victory in 57 years, Arizona Bowl executive
director Alan Young said, “You’d have thought they won the national
championship or the Super Bowl.”
Ministry
reminds me of bowl season in that sense. It can be easy to think that the only
ministry that matters is the high-profile stuff: preaching before thousands,
missionary work in the Third World, giving millions of dollars to nonprofits
and missions organizations, and the like. But effective ministry cannot be
measured by worldly measures of success like audience size or dollars raised.
For the widow living alone, a visit at home by her Sunday School teacher is
more meaningful than anything a megachurch pastor might tell her on TV. For the
single mother struggling to get by, your offer of free babysitting is a more
visible manifestation of Christ’s love than anything she’ll read about in a
missions pamphlet.
Scripture
reminds us that the body of Christ, i.e. the church, is made of many members,
and needs each one in order to function as intended—so don’t let anyone,
including your own doubts and insecurities, tell you that your contributions to
the kingdom of God are insignificant. Low-profile, unacknowledged, “small”
ministry is anything but meaningless—for those you serve, it can mean
everything.
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