Our lives are racing by. I know that it is something that I think about as I grow older. I look back and think of things that I could have done. Things that I didn’t do because I was allowing myself to get caught up with society and with the worries and the strife of life.
Recently, I was thinking that I was growing too old to be of service to God. I regretted all the wasted years when I could have gotten out and done more to spread the Word of God and to show other people the promise of his Kingdom.
I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. On the contrary, I simply felt that I had wasted much of my life. It seemed like I had missed the opportunity to serve God and to accomplish his purpose in my life. I had acknowledged to myself that, in this sense, I was a failure.
I wasn’t praying about this. I wasn’t talking to anyone about how I felt. I was just living with the heavy burden of not having done what God wanted me to do. I didn’t even know what he had wanted, I just knew that I had not done much of anything at all.
I had started reading the Bible according to a 365 day Bible plan that meshes Old and New Testament readings by subject and history rather than by the way the Books of the Bible are presented. I’m not trying to read it in a year as I have done that before. I’m reading at a pace that allows me to dig deeper, generally one or two chapters a day.
I was in the midst of Exodus and was reading of the time when God sent Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh. The study pointed out that these two men were 80 and 83 years old when God sent them on their most important life’s mission.
It was then when I realized that I had not missed my opportunity. I was right where I was supposed to be and at the time that I was supposed to start writing.
If I had attempted to do so earlier, I would not have had the same life experiences. It was through the failures and successes of my life that God wanted me to write and reach out to others.
While I still have days of feeling kind of old (when the bones stiffen and crack and the muscles ache – which is pretty much every day), I no longer question how God can use someone as old as I am to do his work.
Through the work of Moses and Aaron, God brought the people of Israel out of bondage and created a nation. He set them apart and continued his work in setting up a lineage from which the Savior would be born. That Savior is Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah.
God didn’t think the two men were too old. They had the right life experiences to be exactly the individuals that he needed to accomplish his work.
If you are thinking you are too old, too young, too smart, too uneducated, too anything to be of use to God, you are mistaken. God takes as we are and uses us with all of our flaws to tell the story of his goodness and power. He uses our imperfectness to show the redemptive power of his son, Jesus.
If we were everything perfect in every way, why would we even need a savior? It is that we are not much in the eyes of the world that makes the word of God that we tell so powerful.
God will use each of us to serve him in different ways. Just look to him and ask for his guidance and then accept it. He will lead you to the job he wants for you to accomplish. It will be something unique that he has set apart for you since before the foundation of the universe was created. What an awesome God we serve!
1 Corinthians 1:26-31
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.
But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God — that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”