“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you,”
1Thessalonians 4:11 NIV
Ambitions. We are all about them in our current society. Everywhere I turn I see advertisements about chasing your dreams, building that big 7- figure business, to be a face everybody recognizes, and to go, go go. That has never sat right with me, I have never aspired to fame. What about you? What if that fancy life never felt right to you either? I’m tired of the message that if we aren’t doing everything we can to build the biggest business we can, that if we aren’t leading massive non profits, then we are then wasting our potential. I am tired of it even as I partially agree with it.
I agree that God has packed so much potential into each one of us that we will never reach the end of it in our lifetime. I believe that subtle restlessness so many people feel and ignore is not a sign of being discontented,(though of course it can be!), but rather a sign that there is something, even a subtle change that could be made in one’s life.
But. I also believe that not all of us were designed to build huge businesses, travel all over the world, and be gone from home more often than we are home. Maybe that is your calling, but it isn’t mine. I heard the verse from 1 Thessalonians 4:11 when I was probably around 12 and it struck a chord within me. It is my ambition to lead a quiet life.
Ambitions are great, we need people who aspire to build big businesses, we need the people who talk to large audiences and inspire thousands, and we need the people who only ever aspire to impact life in their community.
You see a quiet life is nothing to be ashamed of, and a quiet life does not mean that we are not working with everything we have to further God’s kingdom. Instead I believe it means participating in a small group, opening your home to others, going out of your way to be a support for someone who has no one else to support them. It means helping out with the youth group, making meals for the family that just had a baby, visiting the elderly, and helping out the homeless in your city.
You see if we all were called to the big things in life there would be no one left to do the little things. My ambition has been to lead a quiet life, what about you? Are you restless? What is the source? Might you need to lean in a little closer to home and start serving your own community in seemingly insignificant ways?
Check out more Sunday Scripture from Essentially EmmaMarie