MEDIOCRE NO MORE

Tanzania Update: I leave in 5 days. The pressure is on and we are all feeling it. Please pray. We had a team meeting yesterday afternoon via internet. One teacher is on the verge of strep throat and our team leader was flat on his back all day with back problems. I am feeling the anxiety of leaving my family behind and the burdens that go with it. Please pray. Mark (he is the one with the sore throat) has only one hour in Amsterdam to change to his plane to Nairobi. All of us are looking for good weather for plane travel and making our connections and getting luggage to our destination. Please pray. We are all thankful for the school and the opportunity to bless the school and the students. Mark works for Baker Books and they have donated books for the College library and others are bringing books as well. These books will be a great blessing so pray that this luggage will get arrive safely for the graduation ceremony on Saturday night. Please intercede for East Africa Christian College, Tanzania and our service there. This would be a good time to look up Tanzania in Operation World and pray for that country. I praise God for your fellowship in the Gospel.

For the last couple of weeks I have been pondering my mediocrity. Whenever ministry opportunities present themselves, such as this mission trip, I question my capacities and abilities. As I get older, and weaker, and too often search for simple words that I know that I know but in frustration cannot grasp, and misname people and places sometimes without even noticing, and misspell words and even find upon rereading what I have written that I have used a different word than what I meant to use, and when I fumble with the simplest tasks, I see myself slowly slipping into mediocrity. Mediocrity is described as a quality of moderate ability or value. As ability declines I also feel that my value is declining with it.
Looking backwards I must confess that in the past I thought of myself above mediocrity. I saw myself for the most part as able, useful, valuable, a leader, a risk taker, a better example than most. Now I realize that I was mediocre then as I am now and compensated with natural strength and natural energy, and a loud personality. I thank God that in spite of myself, God has been gracious in my service to Him.
We read in 1 Corinthians 1.26-31, "For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.'"
From this passage I learn some important lessons of which I need to constantly remind myself. 1) According to God, value is not related to ability. In Christ I have value before God. End of discussion. This I must accept without dispute. 2) It is not my ability and capacity that gets the work done but God's ability to work through a surrendered individual. God chose the what was foolish and weak and low and despised by the world, not what was wise and powerful, and noble and strong. My mediocrity doesn't matter. Who God IS matters. (Moses: Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt? God: I will be with you. Jesus to Peter after Peter betrayed Jesus: Feed my sheep). The end result, as it should be, God is glorified in all that is accomplished by His people. 3) I must put one foot in front of the other today and in my future, even I as see the growing deterioration of my capacities, trusting in God's valuation of me in Christ, depending on His ability working in me and through me, walking in faith and not by worldly evaluations or unbelieving personal evaluations, with a growing hope that in my future are unimaginable capacities which I will lay at the feet of Jesus in eternal worship. May God grant us to grow old in faith, and joy, and peace, with a warm sense of our Father's near presence often moving us to tears.