[Monday's Devotional] - Fit for Your Essential Purpose

I like trains. If you are one of my facebook friends you will be used to me posting pictures of engines that I come across.  Most of my friends realise that I am just a witty, charming and incredibly good looking guy who just happens to have railways among his list of interests.  However, there are some less enlightened people who believe that I am a nerdy train spotter.  So, to prove that liking locos is a fascinating, vigorous and manly pursuit, I am going to base this weeks Devotionals on different locomotives and the parallels between their attributes and living the Christian life.

The above loco is a Midland railway 2F (freight).  They were small locos and none of them had names, except those unofficial ones given by loving drivers and firemen.  The best sort of name to have I guess.  They had unglamorous lives, mainly hauling coal trains around the Midlands.  They dated from the late nineteenth century and by the 1930s were already very old fashioned engines. However, they survived right up until the end of steam in the 1960s.  So why were these basic, utility locos in service for seventy years or so?  Well, basically, they were just great at what they were designed to do.  They were reliable and simple to maintain, but their small size also prolonged their lives as they were, by the mid twentieth century, basically the only engines left able to fit through the small aperture of the one mile long Glenfield tunnel.  So, without the simple, unassuming, slow, 2F loco, no coal trains could have gone from Coalville to Leicester.  Simple as that.

Now I don’t go in much for anthropomorphism (putting human characteristics on a non human) just ask my motorbike, but I reckon if the old 2Fs could have spoken, they would have asked for bigger boilers, more power, fancy names and express passenger duty.  Oh yes and no more runs through the smoky dark tunnel at Glenfield.  Have you ever felt that way?  Ever wished that you were made differently?  Have you ever wished that you had been cut out for more glamorous things?  Well don’t.

God made you the way that he did for a reason.  Whatever you are like, whatever your characteristics, be grateful to God that he made you the way that he did.  Not only that, give yourself to God in service.  Thank God that he made you tall and caring or enthusiastic and friendly, solid and wise or small and dynamic; give it back to God in service.  Like the old 2F at Glenfield, God has a tunnel that only you will fit in, one that you were made to measure for, if only you will give yourself, who and what you are, back to God in service.

John Martin-Jones