Cultivate the hospitable heart. We should include time for the word, the smile, the visit, the prayer that will find our neighbor’s need before he has to tell us. Act for others. To give courage to an individual is better than to give money. We can make a person better than his or her best by encouraging a life lived not somehow, but triumphantly!

You make your own name. Your parents gave you the bare sound; you fill it with meaning. Just as you choose your major in college or your vocation in life, you choose your name and complete it. It will forever carry the associations you have attached to it. You are making a name because you are making the habits that make a life—not somehow, but triumphantly!

Consider your name too precious to tarnish. Only you can hurt your name; it is in your power. No one can degrade you; no insult, no humiliation will deter you. Your name is you. It can flame like a beacon. In the face of every temptation and every slur you can raise your soul so high that the offence cannot reach it. You can be magnanimous—great-souled—and in so doing, by using God’s resources, the face of the world can be, should be changed—not somehow, but triumphantly!

We are spending a year of ordinary days; three hundred and sixty-five of them. Our lives are made up of ordinary days. Yet life is no ordinary thing. If we consider our ordinary days cheap—or count them common—we shall make an ordinary life. Every ordinary day given to God and touched by God is a sacrament. A life of God-blessed, ordinary days can shake the world—not somehow, but triumphantly!

There is no need to be defeated. We should not live so lazily or carelessly as to bring distress to ourselves or dishonor to the name of the Christ we serve. We must plan for a life that holds His banner high and walks a straight line forward—unashamed. It is no easy matter to trace a course through the confused, uncertain, contradictory maze of things and people that make up our world, but it is gloriously possible and simple—not somehow, but triumphantly!

Prayer for the week:

Father, may I hold fast to your purposes for me when the days seem drab. Take my ordinary days and make them extraordinary—for your glory. Amen.

Merritt Nielson has a ministry career spanning 50 years including being former director of curriculum for Sunday School Discipleship Ministries. He currently serves as constituent engagement manager for Nazarene Compassionate Ministries.

Written for devotions with Holiness Today.

Please note: All facts, figures, and titles were accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time of original publication but may have since changed.