By Elizabeth Rice Handford, from her book Fullness of Joy
Once in a while, I get to thinking I’m not very necessary for anything. So many of the tasks I do each day seem unimportant. Then I remember the tiny stapes bone, the smallest bone in the human body, and I feel better about the tasks God has assigned me. Sound complicated? It isn’t, really.
I can’t hear well. It has affected every part of my life. I can’t hear what my children say. I hurt people’s feelings because I misunderstand them. I dread public meetings because I can’t hear, even with my hearing aids turned full volume.
I remember once sitting in chapel at Southside Christian School. I thought the principal asked me to go to the piano and play the introduction to the “Hallelujah Chorus.” (Our students had just sung it in a Christmas program.) In front of the whole student body, in the very middle of the principal’s message, I got up from the audience and went to the piano. But that wasn’t at all what the principal had asked.
The ENT doctor told me that the little stapes bones in my middle ear had disintegrated from arthritis. Simply put, the stapes bone conducts the sound waves from the eardrum to the auditory nerve. (They’re called stapes because they are shaped like a stirrup.) It was no wonder I couldn’t hear. How could anything so tiny affect a human being’s whole life? Believe me, they do!
And that’s why the stapes bone comes to mind when I wonder if I am doing anything significant for God. The Lord Jesus says He has given every single one of us a task, an important task that no one but ourselves can accomplish. There are no unimportant people or unimportant jobs in the family of God. He has given each of us the job for which He designed us.
First Corinthians 12:12–22 explains:
The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So it is with the body of Christ. Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But we have all been baptized into one body by one Spirit, and we all share the same spirit. Yes, the body has many different parts, not just one part. If the foot says, “I am not a part of the body because I am not a hand,” that does not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear says, “I am not a part of the body because I am not an eye,” would that make it any less a part of the body? Our bodies have many parts, and God has put each part just where he wants it. How strange a body would be if it had only one part! In fact, some parts of the body that seem weakest and least important are actually the most necessary.
That settles it, doesn’t it? Each of us has a unique task to do for God today, right where we are! There are no unimportant people or unimportant jobs in the sight of our Heavenly Father.
