ordinary

I think 1 Chronicles needs a few more chapters. I’d like to know more about the family of Ephraim.

1 Chronicles 7:21-24 tell us, “Ezer and Elead were killed by the native- born men of Gath, when they went down to seize their livestock. Their father Ephraim mourned for them many days, and his relatives came to comfort him. Then he made love to his wife again, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. He named him Beriah, because there had been misfortune in his family. His daughter was Sheerah, who built Lower and Upper Beth Horon as well as Uzzen Sheerah.”

There’s a lot of drama in those few short verses, and of course Ephraim had many more children than just these four. But the loss of two sons on a raid, and the birth of a new baby boy are compelling. Still, the thing I want to know more about was this daugher who built three towns.

There are some remarkable women in the Old Testament, and we get the stories of a few of them. Why doesn’t Sheerah get a little more space? I want to know if she had a husband, and whether he helped her or did his own thing. I want to know why she decided to build these towns. I want to know if the men of the day opposed her. Nehemiah and Ezra got a lot of opposition; did Sheerah? What kind of person was she, that she accomplished so much?

I guess her life story didn’t have the elements of revelation required to be told in the Bible. It’s enough that she’s mentioned, I guess, because it suggests that sometimes lives of great accomplishment aren’t the most important contributions to God’s kingdom. At the same time I get a hint of a woman who lived faithfully to God and so was able to do great things.

Either way, the idea I’m left with is that each of our lives becomes exactly what God desires it to be, if we walk closely with him. For whatever reason, Ephraim’s territory needed three towns that his daughter built. For whatever reason, my town and my church and my company need an army-trained leader and operator who thinks a lot and sometimes jots down his thoughts. In both cases, God put a person in place and gave the required skills.

It’s a kind of faithfulness that happens around me every day, one I just don’t notice. But each of my days is filled with ordinary people equipped in extraordinary ways to live the lives God calls them to. When I look at it that way, there are no ordinary people, or lives.