One doesn’t learn to speak a language in a couple of months. It will be plugging for a good while yet. Seems that I’ll never get through ‘preparing’ for the mission field. But I’ve been comforted this week thinking of our Lord’s thirty silent years of readying Himself at home with His family and bending over a carpenter’s bench. Were those days any less of a fragrance to God than His later work before the eyes of the people? I think not. A well-made piece of furniture and a healed blind man represented the same thing to the Father—a job well done; mission accomplished. So with us here. Nothing great, but what is that to Him with whom there is no great or small?
– Jim Elliot –