“Doing small things well over a long period of time in the same place is how the Kingdom of God is advanced.”
Not sure if this was something I read or something I heard in a sermon, but it stuck with me, and last night it was my privilege to witness the manifestation of this truth at the 30th annual Evening in December event in Nashville benefitting Daystar Counseling Ministries. It was an event I helped start in 1989 with the Women in the Round, and I’m so pleased that it has become one of Nashville’s signature holiday events for the past three decades. It was a wonderful program….what a joy to reconnect with some old friends and my former boss, the great Connie Smith, and to share the stage with the incomparable Gospel vocalist, Cece Winans. A big shout out to the dedicated Daystar staff, many of whom participated in Daystar groups when they were children, as they continue to work to help young people through difficult personal and family situations by showing them the unconditional love of God. Here’s to the next 30 years…
And at the end of the long semester, here’s to all the teachers of the world as they work that ‘long haul’ with excellence day after day in their classrooms to help students become better persons and more educated citizens of the world…I know that about this time they are SO ready for a much deserved break….tell ‘em thanks when you see them…
During this Advent season, I am again thankful to be able to share Christmas music on various stages with friends and fans throughout the season…grateful that it is part of my call to continue to do ‘small (musical) things well over a long period of time.’ It’s part of my story…and just when I was running out of ideas as to how to express this, this passage from Fredrick Buechner was in my inbox this morning….couldn’t have said it any better…what’s your story?
“THIS IS ALL PART of the story about what it has been like for the last ten years or so to be me, and before anybody else has the chance to ask it, I will ask it myself: Who cares? What in the world could be less important than who I am and who my father and mother were, the mistakes I have made together with the occasional discoveries, the bad times and good times, the moments of grace. If I were a public figure and my story had had some impact on the world at large, that might be some justification for telling it, but I am a very private figure indeed, living very much out of the mainstream of things in the hills of Vermont, and my life has had very little impact on anybody much except for the people closest to me and the comparative few who have read books I’ve written and been one way or another touched by them.
But I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually.”
-Originally published in Telling Secrets
Pax,
Tricia