Offline (S1 E4)

Nazareth Nothingness

“We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

Nathanael’s question stings: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” He wasn’t being cruel, just accurate. Nazareth was a small, obscure village in Galilee with perhaps a few hundred residents. It isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Old Testament. It was the kind of place you left to make something of yourself. Yet God chose it for His Son. Not Jerusalem, not Rome, not Alexandria with its great libraries. A village with no reputation.

Mother Teresa spent her life in places the world had written off, and she put it plainly. Read her line again. She wasn’t being modest. She was describing how God works. Ten thousand small things done with love, in ordinary places, become the real thing. The size of the stage was never the measure. The heart to do it always trumps everything else. We sadly wait for the platform to come, we wait for the world to stop doing what it is doing and turn to you so that you can finally get the attention you think you deserve. But God has a track record of working with people just the opposite. The one who would sing even when no one’s listening. The ones who would get up every day, grind, day after day to do something meaningful even when no one is watching. To do what you are called to do to a virtually non existent crowd takes strength, takes vision and above all, takes God.

We spend a lot of energy apologising for our Nazareth’s: the small town, the average school, the unimpressive job, the modest following, the family nobody has heard of. Social media trains us to compare our starting point with everyone else’s highlight reel. It is disheartening to see the crowd flock towards someone doing meaningless things while you toil away doing something of substance, doing something God has called you to do, but the ones who keep going are the good ones to come out of Nazareth. The ones that keep grinding without giving up, goes on to change the trajectory of their land. Today, nazareth is written in history, all because of a silent carpenter who chose to do what he was called to do, without the fanfare, without the noise, just simple dedication to the one who send Him. Nazareth is History, Nazareth is where he built His story.

But heaven doesn’t read the map the way we do. If the Saviour of the world could come from a place people shrugged at, your place isn’t disqualifying. It might be the point.

“Bloom where you’re planted” is a cliché. “Be love where you’re placed” is a calling.