Verse of the Day for May 16

Paul is saying goodbye. He tells the elders of Ephesus that they shall see my face no more, and a few verses later they are weeping on his neck. This is not a speech from a man who feels nothing.

Yet in the middle of it he says none of these things move me. He means the chains and troubles waiting for him in every city. They are real. They simply do not get to decide his direction.

And look at what he wants. Not greatness. Not a famous name. that I might finish my course with joy. A course is a runner's lane, marked out, specific, his own. He is not running anyone else's race.

When you feel small, it is often because you are measuring your lane against someone else's. Paul's sense of purpose rested on a ministry he had received of the Lord Jesus. Received, not invented. Small or large, it was given.

Maybe your course is a classroom of seven children in a village school, or a sick parent's bedside. It may look small from the outside. Finish it with joy. That is the whole ambition.

Feeling small is not the same as being unimportant.

Grief and steadiness can live in the same heart.