Full Quiver Ministries

What I invest in others can never be wasted.

One of the most tedious but also the cutest stages of chicken raising is the brooder stage. This is where the chicks have to be heated with a ceramic plate brooder or heat lamp day and night and kept with food and  water in a container that is separate from the rest of the flock. There are a lot of reasons for this, but those aren’t what I want to focus on. What I’d like to bring up about this stage in particular is that there is no tangible benefit other than the cutesy cuddles of new chicks. They don’t lay eggs. They’re too small to be slaughtered for meat (Mine are more of a pet and I couldn’t do that to them). They’re not contributing to the house at that point. They are just a pull on the finance front from the feed, bedding, and electricity needed to power the heaters. You have to have a brooding container and a cover so they don’t get lost or eaten. It’s just a lot of expenses and hassle without an immediate return on investment, namely a return that you can eat!  This stage can last upwards of 6 months for most breeds of egg layers, and when eggs are at that point, that’s a big deal. Adding to the frustration is the “all too late for my benefit” knowledge  that 20 minutes from my current house, there is a shop that sells chickens old enough to lay the day they’re purchased. All that being said, the question I’m left with is, is it wasteful for me to raise chicks or should I buy full grown chickens? Having experienced this first hand, I’m inclined to say that the rational, fiscally responsible answer is yes, it is a waste even though I learned a lot and had fun. The point is eggs, and there was a better, faster, cheaper way to get a laying brood together. Where I believe the answer to the chicken conundrum has a clear and definitive answer, that’s not what I’m getting after in this discussion. I want to look at the posture of my heart in this. I want to look at the attitudes that label something as a waste. So if I boil the statement “This was a waste,” down to something that searches out where my heart is, I think I find a question like this:

How am I defining waste?

This term can become problematic for me when I examine how I use it, and how often I use it. I know I’ve spoken of failed experiments, repairs, attempts at a number of things, and relationships with the phrase “Well, that was a waste.” So if I’m willing to label something or someone as a “waste”, how do I define it? 

I want to examine this question in another context. I had a conversation with one of my classmates around the beginning of last school year. The school uses breakout sessions for us students to get to know one another. Me and my classmate began to make small talk, but the emphasis of the school and of the teachings is about hearing from God, so I leaned into the Holy Spirit while we made small talk to see what the Holy Spirit might be saying. The intent is to be more like Jesus where we say what the Father is saying and do what the Father is doing. In this breakout session with my friend I heard Holy Spirit say “There’s a girl!” I thought my friend was married and so I became alarmed and asked, “Hey man, aren’t you married?” He replied that he was not married rather sheepishly. I sighed with relief that I didn’t have to confront him about his adultery, then told him about what I was hearing and asked if it meant anything to him. 

“Yeah, there’s a girl but I’m not pursuing anything because I don’t know that she’s the one. I mean I’m waiting to hear from God that this is THE ONE and then I’ll pursue her. I just don’t want to waste my time. Know what I mean?”

What I said to him next, I don’t know that I fully believed in the moment I said it, but God has been growing this idea inside of my heart ever since. I know my friend has a pure heart and is interested in forever and not for what he can get. So with that belief in mind I said, “It’s impossible to waste your time with this girl, because you’re investing in someone that Jesus loves and that could never be considered waste.” It caused him to pause. It caused me to pause. I needed that statement as much as he did, I’m completely convinced of that. It introduced the thought to me that it might not be possible to waste my time when I’m investing in others. Especially where the Kingdom is concerned.

This thought has become even more prevalent in my mind recently with the changing of seasons for my family. We’ve found ourselves in between a bunch of things and the thought of building new relationships and investing in new places feels a bit daunting. If I’m completely honest, I want to go somewhere safe where I can hide and I know a lot of people. That’s just not the leading of the Holy Spirit right now. He’s inviting us to invest in new people and build new relationships, knowing that the next season has us moving around quite a bit. The temptation to label this invitation as wasted time and resources is very real. Once again, I’m seeing that my mindset is where my current problem resides. I’m faced with the question I posed to my friend last year, should any investment into another person be considered waste?

I would also like to suggest that when I say I’ve wasted my resources on someone that the statement isn’t accurate. I don’t believe I’m concerned with the waste of resources, I believe I’m grieving the loss of something I have made or found to be important. And you cannot equate grief and waste. They are on opposite ends of the spectrum. I think that we can experience loss or disappointment where a personal investment in others is concerned and those experiences can give us the feeling that we have “wasted our resources”, but I believe that experiencing these feelings does not support the idea of waste. In other words, if I view investing my time in a failed or short term relationship as waste, it’s very possible and almost a guarantee that the issue is with my mindset and not the other person or their treatment of my investment. I value what I have more than I value another child of God. I should be willing to lavish love on everyone I come in contact with and as one of my favorite quotes goes, “The price of love is grief.”

I want you to think about the love of Jesus for a moment and how it’s applied. Jesus loves the next person as much as He loves you. Jesus’ love isn’t applied across a curved or sloped graph. There’s no hierarchy for how His love is divvied up, and there’s no dispersion of His love based on our performance. He loves Billy Graham as much as he loves Anton Lavey. He loves us, and has made His love available to us, equally. We have the option of whether to accept or even acknowledge His love and of how much of His love we’re willing to open ourselves up to and experience. He is love, so He loves. He also tells us to love one another like He loves and He states that how we love each other is how the world will recognize that we belong to Him (John 13:34-35). So does the world know me as someone who loves Jesus? Do they see His love through me? And how can I express it?

I want to take this last question to Scripture to answer it. I feel like you see this in Exodus. So, what we’re going to do is look at an Old Testament scripture and bring it into a New Covenant context. It has to do with the building of the tabernacle. There’s several times where giving to the building of the tabernacle is requested throughout chapter 35 but I want to land in verse 24. 

Then the whole Israelite community withdrew from Moses’ presence, and everyone who was willing and whose heart moved them came and brought an offering to the Lord for the work on the tent of meeting, for all its service, and for the sacred garments. All who were willing, men and women alike, came and brought gold jewelry of all kinds: brooches, earrings, rings and ornaments. They all presented their gold as a wave offering to the Lord. Everyone who had blue, purple or scarlet yarn or fine linen, or goat hair, ram skins dyed red or the other durable leather brought them. Those presenting an offering of silver or bronze brought it as an offering to the Lord, and everyone who had acacia wood for any part of the work brought it. 

Exodus 35:20-24

The precious metals in verse 24 are an “offering”. The rest of the materials in that verse are just “brought”. To me that’s significant. It tells me there’s something about those items that sets them apart. I think that notion is visible in the words of Jesus in Now, this structure, the tabernacle, is a place where the presence of God can come and rest on the Ark, right? It’s the precursor to the temple and in some ways the direct influence in the temple’s design. The context of this in the old covenant is that a physical offering of gold and silver was used to build up the place where the presence of God dwells. So when we shift with this picture into the new covenant, what does it mean?

The dwelling place of God’s presence shifts to be those who are bought with a price and have submitted to the Lordship of Christ. There are a lot of things in the old testament that point to this shift, but to me none so potent as the fact that the Ark, the symbol of God’s presence, is only allowed to be carried by the priests. I’ve heard a few preachers talk about this and I agree. I think that the presence of God was always intended to rest on people and not on inanimate objects or in buildings. Paul makes a statement about the reality of Christian life in 1 Corinthians 3:16.

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?

1 Corinthians 3:16 NIV

I feel like I’ve belabored that point enough and that what I’m driving at should be apparent. The followers of Christ are the temples of the Living God in the New Testament. When I give of the goodness that is in me, the stuff that stands the testing of fire (1Cor. 3:13-15), to build up another “temple”, no matter the length or brevity of an encounter, I’m making an offering to the building up of the dwelling place of the Lord. 

The problem for me, especially in this season, is that everything is new. There are new relationships, new places, new schedules, new challenges, new leadership and all of these situations and relationships are  being initiated with a bright flashing neon sign above them that says “POTENTIALLY TEMPORARY”. There is a part of my heart that is reluctant to engage and to build up others because I may not be around to reap any benefits or see the fruits of the investments that I make. The reluctance in me to go all in is rooted in a deep subconscious belief, a lie that has lived in me for years, that I can waste my resources by giving of the things I value and not receiving a return that expressly benefits me. 

One of my favorite teachings from my friend’s ministry, 143 Ministries International, is that when you find out that you believe a lie, you replace it with the truth from God’s word. For me, that word comes from the book of Exodus, probably because I’ve been squatting in the Old Testament for a while. I want to replace the lie of lost value with the truth of kingdom investment. I want my replaced beliefs to manifest in my actions. I believe that my life will now display the heart of Jesus through my renewed heart posture. I’m giving a gift of precious things to everything new. I’m going to go all in and be present in every situation with the belief and understanding that what I’m giving is building up temples of God and that I do not need to see a benefit from or return on my investment to make it worthwhile. I get to enjoy the Father’s happiness in my giving, and that is more than enough!

I want to end this by asking a set of questions that have really dug into me this past few months:

1. Are you believing any lies?

• Ask the Holy Spirit to highlight them for you. In recovery terminology, He might highlight an area of your life that has become unmanageable. In other words, He’ll bring you into a situation that highlights a problem area in your life. The point is never condemnation, it’s always freedom, and it is always meant to take the burden from you not saddle you with shame. 

2. How do you view waste?

• Do you withhold the good things in yourself from others for fear of them not being valued or not being able to immediately receive the benefits of your investment? Where does that fear come from?