We get a lot of funny ideas about what it means to follow Christ. It’s like we’re sitting around waiting for God to call upon us to make some grand, heroic gesture that will prove our love for him. But what if the most obedient thing you can do right now is sign up to work in the church nursery? What if the greatest thing you can for the gospel at this moment in your life is to get out the playdoh with a pack of two year olds while their parents receive the truth of God’s word?
It’s a lot easier to think about the grand things we can do for Jesus than to do the humble things. We romanticize martyrdom and convince ourselves that we would do anything for Christ, but in truth we don’t even like to be inconvenienced for him. We don’t like to “waste” our time on the kinds of jobs that we feel are beneath us, or too boring for us, or too uncomfortable for us. There are other people who will wipe the snotty infant noses, other people who will sing Jesus loves me with the four year olds, other people who will take a weary mother’s wriggling toddler out of her arms and say, “Go. Rest. Hear from the Lord,” other people who are called to those kinds of things. Our attitudes betray what our hearts feel about the lowly jobs, tucked away in the preschool department, where the accolades are few, and where some of the most important work for the Lord is going on.
When we step into the nursery, we surround ourselves with some of the most open hearts and spongy minds in the whole building. We show them what love and peace and passion for Christ look like. We show them that Jesus himself insisted that the children weren’t beneath him, but they are the very purest picture of what faith looks like, wide-eyed trust, enthusiastic awe.
When we step into the nursery, we give adults opportunities to focus on the heart-piercing truths of God’s word. We remove the barriers that might keep a young family at home on Sunday mornings. We show them that not only are we glad they came to church, we can’t wait to show their children as much love and care as possible, and that the gospel is for their kids, too. We show parents what it really means to be a part of a thriving church family, where we take on each other’s burdens, including that overloaded diaper bag and the little attitude their three year old woke up with. We teach them that church is a place where love shows the world who we are, where we don’t consider their children to be burdens or things to be dealt with for an hour, but precious souls who need nurturing and a knowledge of Jesus.
We can’t know what God may do in the heart of a mom or a dad while we care for their children. We can’t know what God may do in the heart of a child whose first memories are church memories. But we can always expect that God will do amazing things through our obedience, especially when that obedience takes the form of humility, giving up our time, our comfort, our ease, our preferences, choosing to believe that he can and will do great things in the nursery and in the hearts of parents who are allowed to be still while his word is preached.
This isn’t a matter of calling. It’s a matter of willingness.
If we want God to ask great things of us, first we have to be obedient in the small things. And once we’ve matured and have begun to think a little more like Jesus, we’ll finally start to see that the small things were the great things after all.
