My mind drifted to two of my most favorite, and the most spectacular, stories this week. 

I think of a boy handing a carpenter-turned-rabbi his lunch, some bread and some (hopefully cooked?) fish. I think of his mother kneading the dough that morning or the day before with floury hands on stone, the yeasty bubbles at last being shoveled into an oven.

I think she didn’t know what she was making with her daily work. She had no idea it would feed more than 5,000 people at the hand of the Son of God. That people would be talking about her bread in 2025. 

I think, too, of a prophet and his grizzled beard, compiling the ingredients for a fire on a mountain while everyone watches. Everyday ingredients: tinder, kindling, logs—plus the inexplicable 12 barrels of water weirdly poured over the top. (Impossible, everyone was probably saying. He’s making it impossible.)  

But this is what I know. Sometimes we’re just handing over our food, or stacking wood—and waiting for God to show up and make something stunning and beautiful. 

Maybe you’re there, training the poor in job skills, or translating the New Testament, or holding kids who wipe their noses on your arm. Yet sometimes what we see as a handicap or a limitation or the ordinary is precisely what’s been orchestrated for whisking our breath away.

Or, as a friend put it to me recently: I’m playing chopsticks—and then I look up, and around me, God’s playing a symphony. 

So yes, your work overseas may be currently defined by waiting among bits of the mundane, faithful, and decidedly non-heroic. “Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you" (1 Thessalonians 4:11). I have a feeling there are quiet radicals everywhere, living fully and faithfully and just trusting that God always shows up.

And I may be forming just another loaf of bread, another fire. Or maybe I’m right where He wants me, playing chopsticks.