What can I do?

I find that I’m frequently tempted to share experiences of my earlier working life as an illustration of some semi-relevant point at our weekly men’s breakfasts.  The other week I regaled my friends with a tale of time-recording.  I can’t now recall how it related to our discussion, but I was amused to find that, when I returned home, my own daily Bible reading directed me to the story of Jesus’ sending out the seventy-two ‘other’ disciples (Luke ch. 10).

To explain this amusement, let me begin with the story I told.  Some forty years ago I was a keen young cost clerk, and one of my responsibilities was the analysis of hours worked on the shop-floor as recorded on coloured clock-cards.  When a new employee arrived, it was the normal practice that he would spend the first week or so alongside experienced workers to learn the processes by their side.  While they were doing this, their time was analysed to ‘training’.  On this occasion, I was aware of some new employees, but had detected no time that had been shown for them as ‘training’.  I taxed the supervisor with this apparent oversight.

“Training?” he replied with a smile, “They don’t need a lot of training.  They start at 8.0 as raw recruits, and by lunchtime they’re semi-skilled operators!”  What I hadn’t realised was that, because it was holiday time, there weren’t sufficient skilled men for them to work alongside, and these new arrivals were working as part of a standard eight-man team, almost from the word ‘go’.  As I read from Luke’s Gospel, I thought of those disciples, going off two by two, and wondered whether they felt like raw recruits, or if they had the confidence of semi-skilled evangelists.  Certainly they returned with feelings of achievement (Luke 10:17), but in the next verse Jesus warned them to remain focussed on the real aim of the exercise.

John devoted many chapters of his Gospel to Jesus’ final instructions to the disciples before his Crucifixion and ultimate departure from them.  He reminded them of the importance of constantly being aware of His presence in their lives, and how this virtually guaranteed the success of their mission in the world.  “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).  Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, expresses the same philosophy, but from the opposite direction, “I can do all this through Him who gives me strength” (Phil. 4:13).

This poses some important questions for us, of course.  What kind of trainees are we?  Firstly, do we know what it is that we’re supposed to be doing?  I confess that’s one I often ask myself!  Do we go about our work with confidence?  Or are we the sort of trainee who reads the manuals from cover to cover and learns all the scripts, but when it comes to the actual situation, we don’t see which page is being acted out before us?  Are we more like those new employees who found themselves part of the team on their first day, without a skilled man beside them to watch and to copy?

My advice is to identify prominent Christians who clearly achieve success alongside humility, and follow in their footsteps, rather like that servant of King Wenceslas, who was told, “Mark my footsteps, good my page, tread thou in them boldly.”  But (not to forget Paul’s example of exploring truth from another direction), here’s an important warning: when one is known as a disciple, one should ensure that one’s steps are worthy of being followed!