Keep working for the Lord…You and I may be just very ordinary people. But we can do some extraordinary things with the help of our Lord. We might just be ordinary, but our God certainly is not.
The longer you are a Christian, the less you speak about “coincidence” and the more you speak about God being at work. A number of my articles fit this category—this present piece included. So let me bring some various threads together into a coherent whole.
First, something that former wild child and now new Christian Russell Brand has said certainly ties in here. He is on an amazing journey of discovery with his newfound faith, and everything seems so grand and wonderful to him. He said this recently: “The more I pray, the more coincidences happen.” Yep.
So let me piece together this latest string of events which I must regard as a God thing. On the weekend I along with a few others spoke at a pro-life meeting organised by my friend and pro-life hero Kathy Clubb on behalf of 40 Days For Life Melbourne for the 3rd World Day Against Abortion.
It was a well-attended event with an eager audience. I suppose the highlight for me was having some folks come up to me afterwards saying that they have been following me and my work for years, or that they heard me speak long ago, and they said it had a real impact for good on their lives.
Well, that sure beats the usual criticisms I get! Indeed, if you are like me, you might often wonder if you are doing much good for Christ and the Kingdom, and feel that you are not making much of an impact. So positive words like these certainly help me to keep on keeping on.
That night I was flicking channels on the television when I spotted the recent film, One Life. I decided to watch it again. I had seen it when it first hit the cinemas early this year. I even wrote it up at the time. As I said in that piece, this film is about
saving young children in Prague—most of them Jewish—from the Nazis in 1938-1939. It is called One Life and it stars Anthony Hopkins who plays a true character: the British stockbroker and humanitarian Nicholas Winton. He had become deeply concerned about these poor children, many orphaned, all in precarious positions, given the Nazi threat they were facing. It was just a matter of time before Hitler took all of the nation. All up Winton and a dedicated team managed to save 669 children and bring them to England, just before WWII broke out. The film looks at his life both during the late 1930s, and in the 1980s.
It was good to see it for the second time. Some things I wanted to write about in my first piece I did, but a few bits I had forgotten. I did write in the first piece about the power of a few individuals to make a difference. I did write about how God normally uses ordinary people.
But one little bit of dialogue from the film I had not included, so I do so now. A young Winton in the late 1930s is sitting with a few others discussing the situation in Czechoslovakia, and they are asking what they can do to help these children. In that brief scene we hear this discussion:
Ordinary people wouldn’t stand for this if they knew what was actually happening.
You’ve a lot of faith in ordinary people.
I do because I’m an ordinary person.
So am I.
And me.
Well, there you go.
That’s just what we need, isn’t it? An army of the ordinary.
If someone can find that particular clip of the film and share it here, that would be appreciated. But I love that last line: “An army of the ordinary.” That is what we Christians are. We of course serve an extraordinary Lord, but we ourselves are just ordinary, broken and frail individuals.