Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples.
1 Chronicles 16:24 (NIV)
Carrying What He Did
The glass gallery at the county museum is two rooms on the second floor, and on a slow weekday morning there’s one man in it. He has an hour before an appointment down the street and nothing to do with it. Pressed bowls, oil lamps, a case of green tumblers with a wave running through them, a cake stand under its own small light.
He reads a few of the cards under the pieces. Donated by the estate of. Given in memory of. The names on the cards belong to the people who owned the glass, and a visitor leaves the room knowing who had it.
The words were said on the day the ark came into Jerusalem, and afterward they stayed with certain men as a standing assignment. They were to declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples.
So the errand runs outward, past the city, to the nations and to all peoples. The men carry his glory and the things he has done. The glory is God’s, and so are the deeds, all the way to the last of the peoples. Those men had nothing of their own to establish, wherever the errand took them. They had what he’d done.
It’s still his glory when it gets said in a kitchen to one friend who asked a real question. The deeds don’t change on the way, and the one telling them supplies nothing but the telling. A bad week doesn’t disqualify him, because the subject was never him in the first place.
The man gets to the end of the second room, where the last case holds a pitcher with a chip out of the lip. He doesn’t read that card. He goes down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, and the room stays lit behind him with no one in it.
A Prayer to Remember
Two doors down from me is a family that has never heard your name from anybody, as far as I know. Reach them, Lord, by roads I don’t have. Let the first thing they learn about you be something you actually did, and let it come to them in time.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
