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When people fall in love with God for the first time, they often feel a new and intense desire:
Lord, use me to do great things!
God will definitely answer that cry of the heart. What’s not always apparent, however, is what it costs to be used by God to do great things.
When Craig Barnes was pastor of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., he found himself remembering an experience from his own childhood in Mrs. Williams’ Sunday School class.
Bible stories were told – acted out, actually – by figures on a colorful flannel graph board. As soon as a new character came into the story, its paper figure was added to the landscape.
“With her long, bony fingers,” Barnes remembers, “she would press that character onto the board until it stuck.”
But Mrs. Williams often had trouble with the flannel graph figure of the apostle Paul.
“He had been used a lot in the stories, and he did not smooth out so well. Long ago someone had spilled Kool-Aid on him, which discolored his robe. Two of us once got into a fight over who would hand the apostle to her, which resulted in tearing his head off. The tape that then held him together made it even more difficult for Paul to stay in place.”
In other words, if you show up in a lot of the stories, you’re going to take some hits.
Barnes concluded that God is not easy on the people he uses.
“The best among us are taped together with prayers and still need a lot of smoothing out.”
There’s an old story, quite possibly true, that the medieval St. Teresa of Avila was once thrown from a cart in which she was riding. She wound up in a muddy brook. She looked toward heaven and exclaimed, “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.”
If you have ever learned a Bible story from a flannel graph board, you know the truth: The people who get used the most look the worst.
They also experience the kind of joy that only saints can know.
Scotch tape and all.