Someone in the crowd exclaimed, ‘‘Isn’t this the carpenter?’’ This onlooker stood bewildered at the phenomenal impact an ordinary and unremarkable carpenter was having. Perhaps Jesus had worked for a summer building a stable for his brother-in-law. Or maybe Jesus had helped carve the benches in the Nazareth synagogue. Isn’t it wonderful to consider that our prototypical man of impact, who was himself the Son of God, spent between ten and fifteen years doing manual labor! He was known in his hometown as ‘‘the carpenter.’’ You don’t earn a label like that with a six-month career. The Bible tells us that

Jesus started his ministry at around age thirty, and that he finished three short years later. So for most of his life he was just a carpenter, waiting for his time to come. This should be a tremendous encouragement to someone who is stuck in what seems to be a nowhere job, or who looks back on her years as a Christian and realizes that she has not yet had much of an impact on her world. Let us not ‘‘throw in the towel,’’ or resign ourselves in our hearts to be ‘‘do-nothings’’ and ‘‘also-rans.’’ Some flowers bloom with the first warm rays of sun in the spring, while others bloom in late summer. Let us patiently await our ‘‘day in the sun.’’ And when that day arrives, we must not squander it; we must live it and each following day as if it were our last. ‘‘Carpe diem’’—seize the day!