Goals Can Fail But a Mission Has to Be Accomplished

In our Free Store bible study this morning we explored a segment of the life of Nehemiah. We discovered that Nehemiah was a man on a mission. And as my daughter's friend Brittany said recently, "Goals can fail, but a mission has to be accomplished." That's some profound wisdom from a teenage girl.

Nehemiah had the daunting task of rebuilding the city of Jerusalem that had been sacked and lay in ruins for about 70 years. Amazingly, he did the job in 52 days! Now that was certainly an incredible accomplishment. For 70 years those walls lay in heaps of rubble but in only 52 days Nehemiah had the rubble cleared and the walls stood strongly erect as a symbol of the renewal of the people living within them.

How is something like that possible? There are many things that could be said about such an achievement but our discussion revolved around one verse in particular. "When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about this, they were very much disturbed that someone had come to promote the welfare of the Israelites." (Neh. 2:10) We think that Nehemiah was successful in his mission because he was doing it for the "welfare" of others. He was motivated by a desire to improve the lives of others and in doing that he tapped into a power greater than his own. In stepping outside the circle of his own personal concerns Nehemiah was empowered by a greater power to do what did not seem humanly possible and had not been done for 70 years.

Our small group was encouraged by Nehemiah. We felt empowered to think that we could achieve things that we might not have thought possible in the past, hard things that remained undone in our lives, in our families, and in our communities. Our friend George felt encouraged that he could complete his studies and get his GED at the age of 51. Another friend said that she felt that God would help her attend the funeral of a friend that she was afraid would be too diffult and painful to attend.

It is extremely empowering to think that we can achieve great things, things we might have thought impossible, by taking upon ourselves the "mission" of promoting the well-being of others!