Dancing in the Desert: Nothing Is Beneath You

The thought happened upon me while I was folding baby blankets at work a few weeks ago.

It's one of those tasks that no one enjoys doing--one we secretly hope someone else will do when we "forget" but needs to be done nonetheless.  I hadn't even been aware it was on our downtime chore list until recently.

That day, the downtime was there, the warmers emptied of linen, and I couldn't find a good excuse to ignore the glaring necessity of this painfully menial task.  Snagging what felt like hundreds of the duck-graced pieces of fabric, I stacked them high on my desk.  Their hastily-folded corners were awry and messy, and they towered haphazardly like a molten, melted pile of well-worn cloth.  One by one, I pulled them off the stack and folded them into neat, puffy squares.  And though it felt tedious and admittedly far below my qualifications, I felt a godly nudge.

This isn't beneath you.

I thought extensively about that.

Nothing (unless morally compromising) is really "beneath" any of us.

I then repeated the same essence in a different phrasing as another blanket swept through my fingers:

I'm not too good for anything.

If you'd told a young, thriving, princely Moses that he'd be stripped from his royal duties to go tend sheep that didn't even belong to him in the middle of the barren brush of the Midian desert, he might've responded with my initial displeasure of folding blankets.  Maybe he would've told God that that was so far beneath him, he'd need a passport and a month's worth of travel to arrive there.

But God knew it wasn't.  And God knew Moses needed to do something he was "too good for."  He shaped Moses' character for 40 years in the desert until Moses was good at doing something he was too good for (tending sheep), in order to lead him to do something Moses didn't feel he would ever be good enough to do (tending the Israelites).

Read that last sentence again--it's a doozie!  See the irony?  The pattern?

I believe God wants us to do big things for Him.  But I think one of the greatest obstacles to us accomplishing them is our own pride.  We don't want the small responsibilities and to have to work up to the greater ones!  We're ready now!  Not folding blankets--give me something better!  Something more noteworthy!

And yet, I find there are countless examples in Scripture where God does His most intricate preparation of His most effective leaders by having them do something far beneath them.

From dungeon-sitting, to enduring humiliating name-calling, to sheep-sitting--God loves to whittle away the hot air of our pompous beliefs about ourselves so that He can reconstruct a pure and humbled distinction that is far more adept at carrying out His work.

It arrives in the physically abject and everyday tasks--from hauling out the smelly garbage and changing the dirty diapers and folding incessant piles of baby blankets.  It includes fetching cups of coffee for people who don't know your name and may never care what it is.  

It can involve emotionally "degrading" and hair-splitting tasks of giving grace to admitting fault to saying we're sorry.

We're not too good for any of it.  None of it is beneath us.  If we are intent on achieving big things for His kingdom, we can't skip lessons to get there based on the touting of our self-reported, self-important resume.  He knows our hearts, and He knows what we're ready for.

We all start at the bottom somehow.  Greatness begins with the menial.  Greatness begins with the lowly.

Greatness begins with the desert.

So pull up a chair and join me, will you?  After all, these blankets won't fold themselves.