January 7

Fulfilling God’s plan


“I am the Lord thy God which . . . leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go” (Isa. 48:17).
“I have raised him up in righteousness, and I will direct all his ways” (Isa. 45:13).

Every human soul has a complete and perfect plan, cherished for it in the heart of God—a divine biography marked out which it enters into life to live.
No room for a discouraged or depressed feeling, therefore, is left you. Enough that you exist for a purpose high enough to give meaning to life, and to support a genuine inspiration. If your sphere is outwardly humble, if it even appears to be quite insignificant, God understands it better than you do, and it is a part of His wisdom to bring out great sentiments in humble conditions, great principles in works that are outwardly trivial, great characters under great adversities and heavy loads of incumbrance. The tallest saints of God will often be those who walk in the deepest obscurity and are even despised or quite overlooked by man. Let it be enough that God is in your history and that the plan of your biography is His, the issue He has set for it is the highest and the best.
—Horace Bushnell.

God grant me these: the strength to do
Some needed service here;
The wisdom to be brave and true;
The gift of vision clear,
That in each task that comes to me
Some purpose I may plainly see.

God teach me to believe that I
Am stationed at a post,
Although the humblest ’neath the sky,
Where I am needed most;
And that at last, if I do well,
My humblest services will tell.

God grant me faith to stand on guard,
Uncheered and oft alone,
And see behind each duty hard
My service to the Throne.
Whate’er my task, be this my creed:
I am on earth to fill a need.

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