A missionary was sailing home one furlough when she heard a cry one night--a cry that is perhaps the most difficult to hear when at sea: "Man overboard!" She arose quickly from her berth, lit the lamp on the bracket in her cabin, and then held the lamp at the window of her cabin in hopes of seeing some sign of life in the murky dark waters outside.
Seeing nothing she hung the lamp back on its bracket, snuffed it out, and returned to her berth with prayers for the man lost at sea. In the morning, to her surprise she discovered the man had been rescued. Not only that, but she learned it was the flash of her lamp through the porthole that showed those on deck the location of the missing man, who was clinging desperately to a rope still attached to the deck. He was pulled from the cold waters in the nick of time. Such a small deed as shining a lamp at the right time had saved a man's life.
It isn't the size of the deed you do that counts. It's the fact that you do it for good and not for evil, and with a trust that God can take every deed we perform and use it for His purposes, in our lives and in the lives of others.
Let us not love in theory or in speech but in deed and in truth-in practice and in sincerity.
1 John 3:18
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