God Gives Us Reason to Hope because He Uses Ordinary People to Make a Difference
By Ian McKerracher
November is the month when we remember the sacrifices of the men and women who gave their lives to protect us from tyranny and terror. Thank God there are still people who willingly give themselves to maintain freedom in the world, a topic well worth discussing, but perhaps on another day.
Today I want to talk about the heroism etched in the face of the man pictured to the left. His name was William Neil McKerracher, a captain in the Second Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), and he was my father. The picture I’ve included was taken by a war correspondent during the Korean War. It perfectly captures my father’s indomitable spirit, and is mounted in the Canadian War Museum, much to the honour and pride of my family.
To my mind my father personified courage and determination in the face of evil, attributes that marked most Canadian soldiers in those days. Not long after completing a tour of duty toward the end of the Second World War, my father signed up again, this time to fight in Korea, where he helped to resist naked Communist aggression—a North Korean army supported by the formidable weaponry of the Soviet Union and the endless human resources of Communist China.
One thing I learned from my father is that in war some things look like big things while other things appear to be little things. But if you look closely you will see that big things consist of many little things clustered together. In other words, for big things to happen the little things must first be taken into account. My father, for instance, was a Forward Observation Officer who regularly went beyond the safety of the defensive line to direct the aim of cannons and mortars, enhancing their accuracy and destructive power. To some his task might look like small potatoes. Nevertheless, what he did was essential, a small contribution that made the big thing of fighting tyranny possible.
The small contributions from people like my father, a farmer from Saskatchewan, are the nuts and bolts that build the great edifice of the Story of Humanity. I love history. But what fascinates me most is not the comings and goings of the names and faces of royalty or generals. Rather I enjoy imagining what a past culture looks like at street level. To illustrate; I once walked through the streets of the ruins of Ephesus in Asia Minor and planted my bottom on one of the stone seats of the municipal amphitheatre.
I got a rush of emotion as I thought of the many tens-of-thousands of bums of common, ordinary people who for 2,300 years have planted themselves in the same place. What might the eyes that rode in the heads above those bums have witnessed? Almost certainly some would have seen the riot recorded for us in Acts 19 in the Bible, not to mention the regularly scheduled concerts and dramas for which the place was originally constructed. Perhaps others sat through a discourse by the famous Greek philosopher and Ephesus’ native son Heraclitus, or a medical lecture by the world-famous physician Soranus on a rare visit home. It humbled me to be included in this amazing and seemingly endless train of humanity.
So here we are, little fishes swimming in the stream of human history, or, to change the metaphor, each of us contributing a single puzzle piece to complete the panorama of our collected lives. And each of us does make a difference. Why? Because we make a difference to our families, to our churches, to our nations, and to God. And how is that possible? It is because God uses everything for His glory, even what we perceive as, at best, our feeble efforts. Our contributions are the bits and pieces, the meat, as it were, in the cultural soup we call life on earth. God calls us to live for Him, of course. But if we rebel and refuse to live for Him, He still provides direction and spark so that every life ultimately fulfills a part of His plan. He even uses times when our departures and returns make the ups and downs of our spiritual lives look like sine waves. The fact remains that God is at work in the lows, as well as the highs.
Such thoughts encourage me to hope for a better world made of the accumulated efforts of ordinary people marching in the grand Parade of God’s design and purpose. An ordinary person in the hand of God will do extraordinary things. It is encouraging to think that through all our faults and foibles, God is at work. Of course, there are the predictable ups and downs as we, in our fallenness, grow hot and cold. There are the pursuits of family and career and pastimes to entertain us, or even draw us away from pure discipleship. But while these failings must be acknowledged, the Plan of God for the redemption of this world moves apace, and beyond all that, He never fails to accomplish gigantic tasks using deeds of heroism writ small to fit the lives of His people. God always provides for the construction of this grand design through the everyday stuff of ordinary people!