What If Your Small Moments Are Bigger Than You Think?
Most people spend a significant portion of their lives wondering whether any of it matters. You show up. You do the work. You give what you have. You say the thing you felt like you were supposed to say to the person you may never see again. And then life moves on and you wonder — did that actually do anything?
That question has a better answer than most of us have been given.
There's a song called "Thank You" by Ray Boltz built around a dream. In the dream, the narrator arrives in heaven and is met by a long line of people, each one stopping to say thank you for something specific — a Sunday school prayer that led to a salvation moment, a small offering to a missionary that funded work the giver never got to see. The song is not just emotional. It's theological. It's a picture of what the Bible actually says about the way faithfulness works.
Landon opened this idea from 2 Corinthians 4, where Paul writes that the troubles we can see won't last, but the things we cannot see will last forever. That's not just about hardship. It's about the seeds we plant in people's lives — seeds we can't see the moment they go into the ground, and sometimes never see again this side of eternity. You can't watch a seed grow from underground. But it grows.
Here's what that means practically. When you encourage someone, help someone, serve someone — you don't just impact that one person. You reach whoever is connected to them, and whoever is connected to those people. The ripple doesn't stop at the edge of the moment. It keeps moving, often invisibly, often through people and places and conversations you'll never hear about. The Sunday school teacher who led that eight-year-old to faith probably never found out it happened. He just kept praying before class.
There's a passage in 1 Corinthians 3 where Paul describes himself as a planter and Apollos as the one who came along and watered what was already in the ground. And then Paul says something that tends to get overlooked: it's not about who plants or who waters. What matters is that God makes the seed grow. And both the planter and the waterer will be rewarded for their work. You are not responsible for the harvest. You're responsible for showing up and using what you've been given.
That's where stewardship comes in. The parable of the talents in Matthew 25 makes a point that's easy to miss. The master distributed talents according to each servant's ability — not equally, but intentionally. And the ones who invested what they had were given more. The one who buried his out of fear lost what little he had. The invitation isn't to do more than you're capable of. It's to be faithful with what's already in your hands. Your gift is yours for a reason. You can't use someone else's the way they can, and they can't use yours. The goal isn't to have the most visible role or the biggest platform. The goal is to hear: "Well done, my good and faithful servant."
But here's the hard part. Most of us who have been doing this for any length of time know what it feels like for service to quietly turn into duty. You stop asking God to use you and start just checking boxes. You're still showing up, but you've lost the joy that made showing up feel like something worth doing. Jesus addressed this directly in Revelation 2, telling a church that had plenty of good activity but had drifted from the heart behind it: "You don't love me or each other as you did at first. Turn back and do the works you did at first."
The prescription isn't more effort. It's the same thing David prayed after one of the hardest seasons of his own life: "Restore to me the joy of your salvation." He wasn't asking to be saved again. He was asking for the overflow back — the feeling of first love, the kind that makes you want to give and serve and pray without calculating what you'll get out of it.
That's the starting place. Not a strategy. Not a commitment to try harder. Just a prayer: God, show me how to love you. Show me how to love people. And then go live with your eyes up.
This week, there is probably at least one person in your life who is waiting for something only you can give them — a word, a moment of genuine attention, a small act of service. You may never know what it leads to. That's not yours to know. What's yours is to show up, plant the seed, and trust the God who makes things grow.
You are doing more than you know.
That question has a better answer than most of us have been given.
There's a song called "Thank You" by Ray Boltz built around a dream. In the dream, the narrator arrives in heaven and is met by a long line of people, each one stopping to say thank you for something specific — a Sunday school prayer that led to a salvation moment, a small offering to a missionary that funded work the giver never got to see. The song is not just emotional. It's theological. It's a picture of what the Bible actually says about the way faithfulness works.
Landon opened this idea from 2 Corinthians 4, where Paul writes that the troubles we can see won't last, but the things we cannot see will last forever. That's not just about hardship. It's about the seeds we plant in people's lives — seeds we can't see the moment they go into the ground, and sometimes never see again this side of eternity. You can't watch a seed grow from underground. But it grows.
Here's what that means practically. When you encourage someone, help someone, serve someone — you don't just impact that one person. You reach whoever is connected to them, and whoever is connected to those people. The ripple doesn't stop at the edge of the moment. It keeps moving, often invisibly, often through people and places and conversations you'll never hear about. The Sunday school teacher who led that eight-year-old to faith probably never found out it happened. He just kept praying before class.
There's a passage in 1 Corinthians 3 where Paul describes himself as a planter and Apollos as the one who came along and watered what was already in the ground. And then Paul says something that tends to get overlooked: it's not about who plants or who waters. What matters is that God makes the seed grow. And both the planter and the waterer will be rewarded for their work. You are not responsible for the harvest. You're responsible for showing up and using what you've been given.
That's where stewardship comes in. The parable of the talents in Matthew 25 makes a point that's easy to miss. The master distributed talents according to each servant's ability — not equally, but intentionally. And the ones who invested what they had were given more. The one who buried his out of fear lost what little he had. The invitation isn't to do more than you're capable of. It's to be faithful with what's already in your hands. Your gift is yours for a reason. You can't use someone else's the way they can, and they can't use yours. The goal isn't to have the most visible role or the biggest platform. The goal is to hear: "Well done, my good and faithful servant."
But here's the hard part. Most of us who have been doing this for any length of time know what it feels like for service to quietly turn into duty. You stop asking God to use you and start just checking boxes. You're still showing up, but you've lost the joy that made showing up feel like something worth doing. Jesus addressed this directly in Revelation 2, telling a church that had plenty of good activity but had drifted from the heart behind it: "You don't love me or each other as you did at first. Turn back and do the works you did at first."
The prescription isn't more effort. It's the same thing David prayed after one of the hardest seasons of his own life: "Restore to me the joy of your salvation." He wasn't asking to be saved again. He was asking for the overflow back — the feeling of first love, the kind that makes you want to give and serve and pray without calculating what you'll get out of it.
That's the starting place. Not a strategy. Not a commitment to try harder. Just a prayer: God, show me how to love you. Show me how to love people. And then go live with your eyes up.
This week, there is probably at least one person in your life who is waiting for something only you can give them — a word, a moment of genuine attention, a small act of service. You may never know what it leads to. That's not yours to know. What's yours is to show up, plant the seed, and trust the God who makes things grow.
You are doing more than you know.