Do you read The Daily Bread? It’s the free quarterly devotional publication in the racks out in the foyer and café at Living Faith. I’ve enjoyed reading it each day since I was young.
A week or so ago, one title caught my eye and I found myself musing over the paragraphs beneath it: String Too Short to Use. Did you read it? Apparently a frugal, elderly aunt of the writer’s had recently passed away. Her grieving extended family was tasked with disposing of all her earthly treasures. In the process, her amused nieces discovered a little bag filled with a variety of tiny pieces of string. They laughed in delight as they read its carefully scrawled label, “String too short to use.”
What?? Why would anyone save something even they deemed unusable? Why not just toss those bits of cord right in the rubbish can? It’s STRING, for heaven’s sake!!
So I started thinking about that.
A lot.
I realized that sometimes I feel just like a tiny, useless snip of Auntie’s string. I just don’t feel very valuable or important or needed. But I really don’t want to be trashed or bagged up and set aside either. Have you ever felt that way too?
I am so very thankful it is my Father who assesses what to do with me, not dear, departed Auntie.
Because, unlike Auntie, my merciful Father doesn’t look at me and, seeing all my many shortcomings, toss me aside in distain to be forgotten. While the Aunt saves old string pieces, the Father saves me—regardless of my size, background, weaknesses, failures, and flaws. And He does it with a glorious purpose in mind, one He has planned just for me.
Then He labels me usable!
You too.
You see, He made each of us exactly how He wanted us to be. Short. Tall. Slight. Husky. Male. Female. Freckled. Dark. Light. Asian. Indian. Graceful. Outgoing. Quiet. The Psalmist beautifully expresses this in Psalm 139:13-18. This is the way The Message reads.
Oh, yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother's womb. I thank you, High God - you're breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration - what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I'd even lived one day. Your thoughts - how rare, how beautiful! God, I'll never comprehend them! I couldn't even begin to count them - any more than I could count the sand of the sea. Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with you!
God designed and created us. But He knew we would mess up. From the beginning, He set in motion the plan to save us from our sin and condemnation—for a purpose. I love how Paul describes it in Ephesians 2:8-10. Again, I am referencing The Message in its simplicity.
Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.
Saved. Useable.
Not worthless scraps of string in a drawer. Not rejected pieces of unloved humanity.
Is that hard for you to believe? That you were formed by God Himself, made in His very image, and then, by His grace through the selfless sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, rescued from your mess, guilt, shame, and hopeless condition? That He longs to use you for His grand Kingdom purposes, that it was His plan all along?
It really is amazing.
Especially when you, like me, can think of dozens of others who are so much smarter, so much more attractive, so much better educated, so much stronger, so much more confident, so better qualified, so much more experienced, so beautifully gifted, so better connected, so much taller…and so better fit to be useful to God.
But God doesn’t measure usefulness the way we do. Good thing for us. It seems He specializes in revealing His power and character, in making Himself known and His message heard through people who are fragile, weak, and frail. The Bible is full of examples of this. Just think about it for a minute. So many flawed heroes in the pages of Scripture.
Moses didn’t speak well. Abraham was old. Sarah was impatient. Jacob was a deceiver. Jonah ran from God. David had an affair. Gideon was insecure. Thomas was a doubter. Peter had a temper. Martha was jealous. Timothy was timid, possibly sickly. Paul was a murderer. Lazarus was dead…
And Zaccheus was short! But not too short for God to use.
All our favorite Bible characters were just ordinary people that had one thing in common. They were all imperfect, fallen, weak humans. Yet God used every single one of them in His story. He purposely chooses to use pathetic people like us for His glorious plans, His plans for us to know Him and make Him known, for us to make much of Him. Check out 1 Corinthians 1:26-30.
Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.
If your resume is sketchy, your skills unimpressive, and your wisdom below average, don’t fret. God can use even you. And me. God wants to use any of us who look away from our own prideful self-sufficiency or our crippling, perceived inadequacies and fix our eyes on His ALL-sufficiency in every aspect of life. God uses all those who humble themselves before the cross, boasting only in Him—His strength, His wisdom, His righteousness, His accomplishment.
Let’s embrace our weaknesses, then, so that the power of Christ may rest upon us, revealing God’s surpassing greatness (2 Corinthians 12:9).
That’s our purpose.
And none of us is too short—or too tall—to do that.
In fact, we are not too ANYTHING!
Our dear Father has labeled us USEABLE.
—Eileen Hill
