“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?”
That was Nathanael’s unfiltered reaction to hearing that Philip had supposedly found the Messiah. Nate didn’t seem to immediately have problems believing Phil’s claims about finding the One their people had been waiting on for centuries. No, his hang up was Nazareth: a backwoods, out-of-the-way, unimpressive little town.
He simply thought the way most of us think: Great people come from great places.
Nazareth might not have been a bad place, however you want to define it, but it certainly wasn’t a great place. Not a place that produced the kind of greatness that gets people’s attention. The kind of greatness that changes the world.
This wasn’t a town of world-changers. This was a town where people kept things spinning just as they always have. This was a town where people worked with their hands. Quietly. For their whole lives. Until they died. This was a town where ordinary was an accepted state of being. This was a place more about duty than dreams. More about nuts and bolts than visions and missions.
Sometimes it can be tempting to dream about moving to some great place so that great things will happen in your life. But maybe it’s best to choose to trust that God is the kind of God who can bring good things from bad places.
