A Word About Digging

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to do a missionary construction trip in Belize, Central America with some of the guys in my church. 

In addition to our construction project, I had been asked to speak at a local church on one Sunday evening. As I approached the church building, I noticed it had no glass windows; only open holes where windows would normally be. Inside, the pews were nothing more than wooden benches. Roughly-poured concrete floors, and a corrugated metal roof. And immediately outside and across the street from the church was a shallow trench about twenty-feet wide that flowed with raw sewage. The smell of that trench permeated the entire neighborhood, and of course, inside the church as the people gathered.

I enjoyed their worship. It was joyous and genuine. I was looking forward to ministering to this precious group of people who, although they had little in the way of earthly possessions, demonstrated a profound devotion to Jesus. I admired their pastor, who sat on the platform behind me as I began to speak.

I spoke from a passage in Luke 19, and as I began, I asked the people to imagine that Jesus came to church that evening, in bodily form. They could actually see Jesus walk through the door and down the aisle and up onto the platform.

“And, suppose Jesus took your pastor by the hand and led him out into the back yard of the church, and handed him a shovel and said, ‘Start digging, here.'” I turned to the pastor sitting behind me, and said, “Pastor, what would you do?” I will never forget his response. With certainty in his voice, he said, “I would deeg, mahn.” Everyone in the congregation laughed.

“Well, what if he left you there, digging. What if he didn’t say another word to you. What if he didn’t tell you why he wanted you to dig, or what it was that you were supposed to learn, or how deep the hole was supposed to be? What would you do?”

He smiled broadly, and nodded, “I would keep deeging, mahn. I would deeg until he came bahck and said, ‘Stop deeging.’  His congregation erupted in applause.

In that Luke 19 passage, Jesus tells a story about a man who goes away to be crowned king, but before he leaves, he hands his servants a small investment; a small responsibility and tells them to stay at it until he comes back. Sometimes the hardest part of obedience isn’t the digging, exactly. God has been known to assign us to places that smell like trouble, or denial, or heartache, or loss. I think in one way or another, every believer has a place that feels a little like that trench in Belize. It may not look or smell exactly like raw sewage, but it has its own weight and its own weariness, nonetheless.

I want to keep at the small, seemingly meaningless work he’s assigned to me. I want to ‘keep deeging, mahn’, not forever, but until he returns. That moment when he says, ‘That’s enough. You can stop deeging now,’ 

I’m convinced … every shovelful will have been worth it.