“This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Take these documents, both the sealed and unsealed copies of the deed of purchase, and put them in a clay jar so they will last a long time.” (Jer. 32:14)
IT SEEMS SUCH AN ORDINARY and mundane act: to buy some land and put the deed in a clay jar. Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonians. Life, as the residents knew it, was destroyed forever. Most of the people were exiled. Nothing remained as it was. It was at this time that God instructed Jeremiah to buy a plot of his ancestral land and hold on to it for a long time. The people were desperate for God to do something extraordinary. Instead, He had Jeremiah do something ordinary, mundane, and seemingly meaningless.
God is good at the ordinary. When He chose to bless the world through one family, He called an ordinary man from Ur. When He gave the people the king they wanted, He chose a young shepherd. When God stepped into human flesh, He did so as an ordinary baby born to ordinary parents in an ordinary town, and He first announced the news to ordinary shepherds.
We want to see God in the spectacular, astonishing, and miraculous. But God is most often at work in the average and ordinary. Anyone can see the miraculous. Only those who earnestly seek will find God working everywhere else. Like Jeremiah, we may be asked to do something simple that points to a future hope for others.
Let God infuse your ordinary moments with glimpses of divine hope.
Brian Niece is a former pastor who is now pursuing a PhD, writing, spending time with his wife and three kids, and watching way too much football.
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