A Responsibility to You; An Act of Faithfulness for Me

Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful. – 1 Corinthians 4:2 NIV

Whatever the activity in which you engage, do it with all your ability, because there is no work, no planning, no learning, and no wisdom in the next world where you’re going. – Ecclesiastes 9:10 ISV

Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. – Romans 12:11 NIV

In the months leading up to April 1, 2020, the countdown was on. After faithfully writing or procuring a fresh devotional post every single day for ten years, I thought we would scale back to six days per week or even five days a week. A series of notices were included at the bottom of four devotionals. “100 Days of Christianity 201.” Then, “75 Days of Christianity 201.” Followed by “50 Days…” well, you get the idea; and then 25. You would be forgiven if you thought I was ending C201.

And then something happened.

The world shut down due to… well, you know what it was due to.

Suddenly I had a lot more time on my hands. And I figured, so did readers. So I simply ignored the countdown we had done, and kept posting every day.

It’s now three years later, and I feel driven by the same sentiment. Because the world has never fully returned to what it was before, it seemed like a good idea to just keep going. But slowly, there was a realization dawning that I needed to be doing this, even if, as we posted two days ago, absolutely no one was reading it. (The subscriber list and daily stats do indicate otherwise.)

Sometimes I will check in my browser history to compare the time I first opened a new page draft to the time I completed the writing or editing of a single post. It’s usually between 40 minutes and an hour. That’s an hour spent thinking about the things of God, His word, theological and doctrinal matters, examining the spiritual reflections of others.

I don’t know that there is some other way I could commit that amount of time otherwise. This is the particular discipline that I need to keep focused.

Some of you know that another ministry venture which occupies my week is owning a Christian resource store (or shop for my British readers.) One day not long ago I looked around the inventory in our remaining store, which is well over $100,000 Canadian. I mentally added to that the amount of fresh inventory that is added every year, and factored in that we once had three stores, and then thought of the thousands of dollars that have been spent on rent in those locations.

And then it was as if God spoke to me.

‘Maybe this is what it took to get you to be the person you are today.’

In other words, all those thousands of dollars spent on Christian books, Bibles and other items was a necessary step in keeping me busy about Kingdom work, when I could have been occupied doing and thinking about other things. This is what it took, not unlike that sitting here composing and curating devotionals is also what it has taken for me to become who I am to be.

With the bookstore, and the various other ministry ventures Ruth and I have been involved with doing through local churches, and independently, another new thought entered my head in the last three years: the word missionary.

I had never thought that we moved to a small town from Toronto specifically to be missionaries, but as I tried on the word for size, it seemed to fit. Missionaries… and maybe this is what it took…

There is a saying and although the wording varies slightly depending on what you’re reading, it’s usually something like ‘Play with the cards you’ve been dealt.’ We tend to use this phrase where someone is facing a tremendous challenge, a physical handicap, a broken relationship, a chronic health issue, the loss of job, etc. In other words we tend to associate the phrase with coping with the negative factors that can creep into our lives.

But there’s another side to this.

In serving the Lord, it might mean taking the circumstances we’re in and the opportunities that lay before us, and then simply running with those realities and doing so, as the “The Preacher” of Ecclesiastes reminded us above, “with all our might.”

It might mean taking the ministry — to a community, to our friends, to our work associates, to our family — that has been entrusted to us, or stewarded to us, and being faithful with it, as Paul reminded the Corinthians in another verse above.

Or as he told the Romans (also above), it means never giving up (CEV), never lacking enthusiasm (AMP), never decreasing our devotion (GWT, ISV) in serving.

…So as we complete year 13 here at C201, I find myself where I was three years ago: released from the constraints of providing a daily devotional, but not — at this writing anyway — free to walk away from what it does to me to be writing here each day.

So right now it’s business as usual, but if I miss a day, know that we more than surpassed our ten year goal.

Thank you for reading and subscribing. Thanks to my wife Ruth and son Aaron for being available for consultation. Thanks to all the writers whose material we use, and especially to Clarke Dixon for his weekly contribution. Finally, thanks to BibleHub.com for being my go-to search provider for Biblical texts.