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God's Handiwork

           For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:10)

          This is a verse I probably write about too often, but it’s the verse of the day on my Bible platform, and it resonates today. “The Chosen One” is one of those themes, especially in fantasy fiction, that one faces whether one wants to or not. In fact, in the Harry Potter series, Harry is told that the reason that he was the Chosen One was because his enemy chose him – by mistake, not because of anything actually connected to Harry.

          In Christianity, of course, we have a Chosen One, who is Jesus Christ, our Lord. Unlike Harry, Jesus fully deserves the status of Chosen One. But without going into the quagmire of a discussion of predestination, today’s verse suggests that we are also chosen ones. God prepared work for us to do, whether as individuals or groups. We, individually and as a group, have at least one purpose. Quite probably, we have lots of purposes.

          A challenge with our purposes is that we think it has to big and dramatic, even to the point of saving the world (or at least lives.) But your purpose today might be to take care of a loved one or listen to the woes of a friend. Your purpose could be to buy or grow the food your family eats, or to cause the delay in traffic that prevents someone from causing an accident that would have killed someone.

We don’t know how what we do plays into the bigger picture. Someday, we may learn about it. But for now, we need to remember that our lives are sort of like the domino effect. What we do sets off chain reactions that would be amazing if we could step out of ourselves and see them. And what might be even more amazing about it is the fact that what we do can build rather than topple. We can set the next person we see on their feet instead of knocking them over. The domino effect in  reverse, so to speak.

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