Your name in the chain

You are at the end of this devotional and the beginning of the rest of your life.

For three hundred and sixty-four days you have been reading about people who received something and held it and passed it on. You have read about the ones who held it under the most extreme pressure the world can produce — fire and sword and prison and plague and ideological terror and the slow attrition of institutional betrayal — and you have read about the ones who held it in ordinary faithfulness, day after day, in small rooms with small groups, doing the unglamorous work of formation that produces every remarkable thing the church has ever done.

You are in this story.

Not as a reader. As a participant. The faith that was ignited in Jerusalem in 30 AD and passed through every person in this devotional has come to you — through your parents or your community or a stranger on a bus or a book at three in the morning or a crisis that broke everything open. It came to you by the same chain that ran from Paul to Timothy to faithful people to others.

You received it.

Now it is yours to hold and yours to give. Yours to embody in your specific life, in your specific community, with your specific gifts and wounds. Yours to pass to someone who is coming behind you — your children or your students or your friends or the stranger God places in your path.

The chain runs through you now.

What will you do with it?

The chain runs through you now.

Four links in Paul's sentence: Paul. Timothy. Faithful people. Others.

You are somewhere in that chain. Someone was Paul to you — who handed you the faith, who modeled it, who passed it on. Someone is Timothy to you — who needs what you have received, who is coming up behind you, who needs the faith embodied in a person they can see.

You did not receive it to keep it. You received it to pass it.

Whose name goes after yours in the chain?