Toenails & Why Your Life Counts: Finding Ultimate Worth

We are all called to great things. The real question is whether or not we understand what greatness means.

Because sometimes it might mean spending time cutting children’s nails.

Amy was a young woman who loved God and felt his call on her life to serve Him by traveling as a missionary to other countries. She believed strongly that she was to share the truth of the Bible, and her focus was mainly on reaching women (who were often ignored or socially restricted from interacting with male missionaries).

Her travels led her to India, where after traveling around in an ox-cart, evangelizing to women in villages with a small, devoted team, she eventually became aware of the prevalent practice of child prostitution in the temples (both young girls and boys). When a little girl escaped from a temple and fled for refuge to Amy’s home, the issue became personal.

Amy began working to free children from this terrible form of sexual slavery, and her efforts led to hundreds of children being freed, fed, clothed, housed, and educated at the orphanage and mission she founded. 

No longer able to travel about evangelizing, she instead became “Amma” (Tamil for “mother”), and her newfound duties as a mother of many included that of “cutting the toe nails of a thousand children” (as her biography quotes*).

Amy Carmichael died today, January 18, in 1951, at the age of 83. She had worked in India as a missionary for 55 years without furlough. A law was passed outlawing temple prostitution for children about three years before her death.

The mission she founded still operates today.

She had traveled to India planning to work as a evangelist and focusing on teaching adults about the Gospel… and ended up cutting toenails and mothering a huge number of little children instead. 

Would you say her life was wasted? Do you think she missed the mark of making an impact? Toenails seem like an insignificant task compared to preaching the gospel… but apparently not to God.

God had so clearly orchestrated the timing and work He brought her to be about that she cheerfully and joyfully submitted to His plan, His definition of great things. 

Her faithfulness and deep humility give me such encouragement, especially in my current season of diapers, pots and pans, laundry, constant teaching, and yes, often cutting toenails.

What I am called to do right now as a homemaker, a wife, a mama, may not seem like high value in the eyes of the world, but I have no doubt it is exactly where I am supposed to be, and therefore I can trust that my God in His wisdom has decreed it to be worthwhile and significant.

And in that trust I can wake up each morning and know that my longing to live a life of worth and purpose is carried out by my faithfulness in serving and loving those around me to the best of my abilities, with the strength and joy He gives.

I fiercely believe this is true for you, too.

What have you been given to do in this season? Do you also fight the thoughts that sometimes come to tell you your efforts are meaningless and trivial, insignificant, worthless? 

Here’s what the Bible says: Whatever you do, work at it with your whole being, for the Lord and not for men, because you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as your reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

(Colossians 3:23-24)

I find joy in remembering Amy and her work as “Amma” because it gives me renewed strength in my own often seemingly mundane and unimportant work . You can take heart knowing it applies to your work, too.

God sees you, sees your faithfulness, your efforts given in love and service. And He finds that to be of great value – regardless of your opinion or perspective, or anyone else’s. Keep on in your faithful work, my friend. Keep on walking each day in what you have been given to do!

So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.

(Galatians 6:9, NLT)

Even if doing what is good is clipping the toenails of little children.

• Maria

* Amy Carmichael: Beauty For Ashes, A Biography; Iain H. Murray, Banner of Truth Trust, Carlisle, PA (2015)

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