Famous folks I have known

I’ve known some important and even famous people. Don’t stop reading just yet; I’m not going to go about name-dropping. For one thing, that isn’t what this post is about. For another, I would run the risk that some of them might sue me for defamation of character (by association).

At the time when the path of my life crossed that of theirs, mostly they weren’t famous yet. They were just the guy that lived down the street, the woman in a class I was taking, some people in a church we were attending, someone who worked for the same organization I did: just ordinary Joes and Jills. Who knew that they would become famous? How could I have anticipated that they would write what they did, accomplish what they did, or have the positions that they later obtained?

(OK, I will do one little smidgen of name dropping, but it was someone I never actually met. You knew that the science fiction author Isaac Asimov had a doctorate in chemistry from Columbia University? Well, he did. And his mentor was the same prof who was my mentor there a few years later. I worked in the same laboratory he did. That poor prof had the unfortunate distinction of having the highest percentage of his mentees who never became practicing chemists. Asimov and me. What disappointments!)

ANYWAY, my point is that when I was associating with each of these people I had no idea “who they were”. They just seemed ordinary, but later they showed that they were anything but ordinary. This weekend I watched the movie, Made in Dagenham, a depiction of the 1968 strike by a few women working in the Ford automobile factory in Dagenham, England. They wanted to be paid as much as men were being paid for equal work. They won not only the pay raise they wanted but sparked laws in England and in the U.S. guaranteeing that right. Ladies, if you work outside the home, your paycheck reflects what these anonymous “ordinary” women accomplished.

I think this was the problem with the people of the little town of Nazareth when they refused to believe that their long-time neighbor, Jesus, was anybody special. He was just the son of the carpenter. Because they couldn’t see that he was who he said he was, he couldn’t do anything special for them. The story is in Matthew 13:53-58.

I need to stop considering people “ordinary”. Each person I know has special talents and abilities that could lead him/her to accomplish extraordinary things. And if they know Jesus and are being led by the Holy Spirit, they certainly are somebody special. Get out of the way, world, because I know a lot of people like that! They’re going places and doing things, even if they don’t look like it right now!

Don’t let me down, now, y’ hear?