Fellow soldiers in the Christ, God is aware of your skills, your capacities, knowledge and thoughts. Indeed He is the one who bestowed upon you these gifts. However, some of us do not know how and when to use these endowments that God gave us to sustain ourselves and families. This is mainly due to lack of determination, or let me call it faith. “Occupy till I come” In Luke 19:11-13, our Lord Jesus told his disciples a parable of a noble man who went into a far away country to obtain a kingdom and would soon return. This wonderful man called his servants and gave each the same amount of currency equal to about 4 months of salary (a minas) . He told them to “occupy” but many of them detested his authority. So, what is this word, ‘occupy?’ It may mean to do business, to trade. It can again mean to exchange or to even change something to make it more profitable. In Proverbs 3:13 -14, the Bible says: “Blessed are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding. For her profit is better than the profit of silver and her gain better than fine gold.” More often than usual, God gives or tells us to occupy some business, offices, and other type of work in order to be in a happy life, but we remain captive under forces of fear. Having failed to grab the opportunities, we blame friends, former schoolmates, workmates, relatives or even the ruling government of failure to create job opportunities for citizen. Please wake up and go to work or see what to do, you have the potential. Stop blaming other people; God is with you and you will overcome all odds. Be fearless. In 2 Kings Chapter seven, we read a story of four lepers who felt that their lives were hopeless. They lived in Samaria which was under the control of Syrians Army. People suffered a lot, it is said that even children were cooked or boiled and eaten. In other words it was a terrible situation. “Now, there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. They said to each other, Why stay here until we die? If we say, ‘We’ll go into the city—the famine is there, and we will die. And if we stay here, we will die. So let’s go over to the camp of the Syrians and surrender. If they spare us, we live; if they kill us, then we die.” (2kings 7:3-4) The four walked out to the Syrians army’s camp and found that the Lord had caused them to run away based upon “strange noise” that they had heard. The lepers found what to eat and drink, and eventually called people of Samaria out to share in the abundance of food left behind by the Syrian army. A significant and often overlooked way that we serve God is in our everyday tasks. Martin Luther understood this when he wrote, The maid who sweeps her kitchen is doing the will of God just as much as the monk who prays—not because she may sing a Christian hymn as she sweeps but because God loves clean floors. The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship. God loves you.
