"It was by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth."
In today’s reading from Acts, we see God's power revealed through a miraculous healing. A person is restored to perfect health. Whom did God choose for this amazing display of His power? A high-profile person, surely . . . a king? A nobleman? A leader among men?
No.
God chose a crippled man. A poor, outcast, unnoticed crippled man . . . totally invisible, really, until Peter healed him.
How often do you feel invisible in the work you're doing? Maybe you stayed home with your children yesterday and only got one load of laundry folded. Maybe you went to work and made copies and stuffed envelopes. Maybe you planted seeds that won't come up for weeks, or handled customers' phone calls all day. Maybe you spent time with people that no one notices.
Maybe you feel like no one notices you, either. Maybe you feel like what you do isn't important.
But friends, God has often chosen to make God's power known where we least expect it. On the margins. In the spaces between what most people see. Just out of the mainstream. Among the invisible. In the book of Acts, people learn about who Jesus was by what His followers are doing. Peter healed the crippled man, previously invisible, in the name of Jesus. He proclaimed it boldly: Jesus is "the stone rejected by the builders, which has become the cornerstone.” Jesus’ kingdom is being built in Acts by those who followed Him in life, whose every work is placed solidly upon that cornerstone.
Like those early church followers, we don't have Jesus before us in body to show us the way to the Father. Yet we can choose to make Jesus the cornerstone of everything—every load of laundry, every paper graded, every batch mailing, every child bathed. Those things that seem insignificant, when done in the name of Jesus, take on eternal significance. Maybe no one else sees them, but God does. And it is on such tiny, insignificant acts that Jesus builds His Kingdom.
Which of your tasks today can you set firmly upon the cornerstone of Jesus?
Abbey Dupuy is a freelance writer and homeschooling mama to two-year-old twins, a first grader and a new baby. You can find out more about her here.
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