Quick quiz before you keep scrolling. No Googling, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
Who won Best Picture at the Oscars last year? Who won Album of the Year at the Grammys? Who was Time’s Person of the Year?
Don’t feel bad, I couldn’t answer those either, and I looked them up an hour before I sat down to write this.
Here’s the thing, Dear Reader. Every single person on that list spent real money, real years, real sleepless nights chasing exactly the thing you can’t remember right now. They got the recognition, the stage, the headline, the trophy in the cabinet. And two, three years later, most of us can’t even name them.
That’s not a dig at them. That’s just how recognition works. It has a shelf life. It only ever lights up one small circle for one small window of time, and then it moves on to the next face, the next fad, the next thing.
So let me ask you a different question, because I actually want you to sit with this one for a second.
Who is the one person who has been most influential in your life? Not your favourite celebrity. Not someone with a blue checkmark. Because let me tell you, some of the most influential people in your life, you couldn’t put their name on a billboard. A teacher, maybe. A grandmother. A coach. Someone who showed up for you for years and never once posted about it.
They never had recognition. But they led a life of deep significance, a rooted life, often unseen, but one that changed the trajectory of your life. In my case, it was my Confirmation Leader when I was 16. An amazing lady named Chee-Chee. And she literally prayed me to Jesus through the course of that year.
Edward Kimball
I want to tell you about a guy named Edward Kimball, someone you’ve probably never heard of, but someone who led a deeply significant life.
In 1855, Kimball was a Sunday school teacher in Boston. He was nervous, but he’d come to talk to one of his students about Christ, a seventeen-year-old shoe store clerk who showed almost no spiritual promise. So he walked into the back room where the kid was wrapping shoes, put his hand on his shoulder, and simply told him, “Jesus loves you.”
That was it. That was the whole sermon.
The boy’s name was Dwight L. Moody. He gave his life to Christ that day, and went on to become one of the most influential evangelists of his generation.
Moody’s preaching later lit a fire in a young pastor named F.B. Meyer. Meyer influenced J. Wilbur Chapman. Chapman influenced Billy Sunday. Billy Sunday influenced a man named Mordecai Ham. And in 1934, Mordecai Ham led a reluctant sixteen-year-old farm boy in North Carolina to Christ at a tent revival. That boy’s name was Billy Graham.
Billy Graham went on to preach the gospel in person to an estimated 215 million people across 185 countries, with roughly 2.2 million responding to his invitation to follow Christ.
How many of us can name Edward Kimball, or have ever even heard of him? He never preached to a stadium. He has no crusade named after him, no biography on a shelf somewhere. He just showed up, on his lunch break, for one uninterested teenager, and told him the truth.
Recognition only remembers Billy Graham. Heaven remembers Edward Kimball (and Billy Graham).
A letter nobody reads
There’s a tiny letter tucked near the back of the Bible called 3 John. One chapter. Fifteen verses. Most people skip right past it, which is fair, because on the surface it just reads like an old pastor’s personal note to a friend about a church problem.
But stay with me, because there are three men in this letter, and depending on the day, I think one of them is you and one of them is me.
The first guy, Gaius, opens his home to strangers passing through, people who have no way of paying him back or putting in a good word for him anywhere that matters. He just serves them, quietly, consistently, and keeps doing it.
The second guy, Diotrephes, is the opposite, and here’s what’s unsettling about him: he’s not a heretic. His problem isn’t bad theology. His problem is that he loves being first. He wants the position, the influence, the last word. And when people threaten that, even good people doing good things, he shuts them out.
The third guy, Demetrius, barely gets a mention, but here’s the compliment paid to him: he’s well spoken of by everyone, and even by the truth itself. His reputation isn’t manufactured. It’s just true.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. This letter isn’t really about church politics. It’s about two roads. One is paved with recognition: you engineer your own fame, manage your own image, make sure people notice. The other is paved with significance, you let God handle your reputation, and you just focus on being faithful with whatever’s actually in front of you.
And sometimes that second road comes with recognition too. But the recognition is never the point. It is never the why.
The towel
If you want to know which road Jesus was on, there’s a moment in John’s Gospel where he gets up from a meal, wraps a towel around his waist, and washes his disciples’ feet. Including the feet of the one who was about to betray him.
This is the same Jesus who, a few chapters later, doesn’t grasp at status or defend his own name, even though he had every legitimate claim to it. Paul writes about it in Philippians: Jesus didn’t consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. He emptied himself. Took the form of a servant. Went all the way to a cross.
And then GOD exalted Him.
Glory came through humility, not around it. Jesus didn’t skip the towel to get to the throne.
Can I be honest with you?
My daughter recently started calling me “servant.” As in: “Servant, bring me my tea!” She’d seen someone do it somewhere in one of her shows.
My first reaction was to feel a little offended, if I’m honest. I wanted respect. After all, I am the DADA.
But the truth is, in that moment, I felt the Holy Spirit say: “Well, she’s not wrong…” I am called to serve her. Maybe not quite in the way she meant. But in that moment I got to reframe it for her. “Yes honey. I am your servant, and you are mine. In this house, we believe we are called to love and serve each other.”
So here’s what I actually want to ask you, whether you’ve been walking with Jesus for thirty years, or you’re standing somewhere on the edge, not sure if any of this is even for you.
Where have you been quietly building your life around being noticed, when what is being offered to you is a life of real significance?
I think about Edward Kimball, because I think most of us quietly assume our lives only count if they get big. If enough people notice. If the story ever makes it to a stage somewhere.
But Kimball never got a stage. He just told one kid the truth, on an ordinary lunch break, and let God do the rest with it.
What if that’s available to you too? Not the platform. The faithfulness. Right where you already are, with exactly what you’ve already got.
I don’t know what that looks like for you this week. Maybe it’s one honest conversation you’ve been avoiding. Maybe it’s showing up for someone who can’t do a single thing for you in return.
And maybe it simply starts with this:
“God, I submit my desires to you. Increase my desire for You. Help me pursue a life of significance, and to trust you with the rest. In Jesus name, Amen.”
Praying for a significant week for you, friends!
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