Brothers and Sisters, 

As I write this, I have heard that a group of people from our Great Village church is on a mission’s trip to Honduras. They had some travel challenges at the beginning of their journey. Please pray for them as they seek to minister this week.

Our church here in Sackville is beginning the year by studying the book of Nehemiah. This week, we are in chapter three. That’s the one where we read names of people who were part of the construction of the wall and gates. At first, it is harder to see the importance of these thirty-two verses than some of the other parts of Scripture. But then, like everywhere else in God’s Word, there appeared some wonderful morsels of wonderful food. What a gracious God He is to feed us from every part of His Book.

As I meditated on the first three chapters of Nehemiah, I became more and more grateful for those people who can use their God-given imaginations to see what others cannot. The walls had been down for 150 years when the book of Nehemiah opens, and Nehemiah lived about 1500 kilometers away, and yet God gave him a growing imagination of what could be accomplished when God blesses and His people work together. Some of us get a bit scared by dreamers, and it seems that we need to encourage dreamers to use their imaginations for the glory of God and the good of His church. Without Nehemiah’s leadership in helping people see what they could not, the wall would not have been repaired.

And then I thanked God for the people who bring balance to the dreamers. I wanted to call them realists, and sometimes they are called dream-killers, but I have settled on “detailers” but I would be ok if someone would keep brainstorming with me on this one. Somewhere between Nehemiah 2 and 3, a lot of planning and preparation was done. Someone had to make the connection between the dream of repairing a wall, and the reality of the size of the project (2.5 miles of wall!), where they lived, and who was on the team. Someone had to teach perfumers how to construct walls and priests how to put up really sturdy gates. We don’t know who planned out the project, but thank God for them! (By the way, in 1960, the architect Buckminster Fuller proposed erecting a two-mile wide dome over Manhattan. Not every dream should become a reality.)

And then I thanked God for the faithful workers. There are more than 40 groups or names listed in this chapter. Someone broke down the project into manageable chunks and they each took a part and got busy constructing. God knows each one and the work they did for Him and to encourage the others - He lists them by name. We know that these men and women would wake up with sore muscles and cracked hands for weeks as they connected their part of the wall to the people next to them. In the next chapter, Nehemiah states: “The people had a mind to work.” What an incredible thing it is to see God’s people cooperatively working together without worrying about who got the credit. May their tribe increase!

Maybe you can stop right now to thank God for the different and diverse group of people God has brought together in your church. Each one is important to God and He knows them by name. Each is important to our churches, for God has put them there. The dreamers and the detailers and the doers are commissioned by God in different ways, but all of them are vitally important. Call them by name and thank God for bringing them into your life. Maybe write one or two a note of encouragement. 

On to Nehemiah four - with plenty of opposition… In the meantime, may God bless and keep each one of you.

Andrew