Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. (John 13:14)

I know I have been guilty of wanting to control my mission field rather than seeing the opportunities right in front of me, which usually is ignoring the people He has placed in my path.

In my morning devotions, one line jumped out at me. (Full devotion below)

“Notice the kind of people that God brings around you, and you will be humiliated once you realize that this is actually His way of revealing to you the kind of person you have been to Him.”

Ouch.

God wants us to be prepared for ministering opportunities by taking advantage of those around us. We want to wait for something big, but we will never be prepared for that unless we complete our basic training and minister to those we come into contact with every day. If we don’t our “spiritual muscles” will not be up to the task when a crisis truly hits and we are needed on the battlefield.

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Ministering as Opportunity Surrounds Us

From “My Utmost for His Highest,” a daily devotional by Oswald Chambers
https://utmost.org/modern-classic/ministering-as-opportunity-surrounds-us/

Ministering as opportunity surrounds us doesn’t mean choosing our surroundings; it means ministering wherever God places us. The characteristics we manifest now, in our immediate surroundings, show God what we’ll be like in other surroundings.

It takes all of God’s power in me to do commonplace things in the way God would do them. When Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, he was performing work of the most menial and commonplace kind, yet the way he performed it made it holy. Can I use a towel in the way Jesus used a towel? Towels and dishes and all the other ordinary stuff of life reveal what I’m made of more quickly than anything else. It takes God Almighty in me to do my chores in the way they ought to be done.

“I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you” (John 13:15). Watch the kind of people God brings around you. You will be humiliated to discover that this is his way of revealing to you the kind of person you’ve been to him. He is telling you to treat the people in your life as he has treated you. “Oh,” you say, “I’ll treat people as I should when I’m out ministering in the world.” That would be like trying to produce the munitions of war in the trenches; you’d be killed while you were doing it.

We have to go the second mile with God. Some of us get worn out in the first ten yards, because God compels us to go where we cannot see the way. “I’ll wait to obey until I get nearer the big crisis,” we say. We have to obey now. If we don’t practice walking steadily in the little things, we will do nothing in the crisis.