Let me tell you a story told by James Billington, Librarian of Congress and a student of Russian history. Billington happened to be in Moscow in August of 1991. It was a tense and dangerous time, with the old Soviet regime giving way to a new social order. Boris Yeltzin and a small group of defenders occupied the Russian White House and successfully managed to face off an enormous number of tanks and troops poised to attack, and to restore the old guard in the Soviet Union.

Surprisingly, a key role in this successful resistance was played, said Billington, by the babushkas, the "old women in the church." These bandana-wearing old grandmothers, who had kept the orthodox church alive for years during the Soviet period, had been the butt of jokes by both Russians and Westerners alike. Nothing could have seemed more pathetic and irrelevant than they, hunched over and wrapped in woolen shawls. They were widely regarded as evidence of the eventual death of religion in the Soviet Union.

Yet on that critical night of August 20, 1991, when martial law was proclaimed and people were commanded to go to their homes, many of these women disobeyed and went instead to the place of confrontation. Some of them fed the resisters in a public display of support. Others staffed medical stations, others prayed for a miracle, while still others, astoundingly, climbed up onto the tanks, peered through the slits at the crew-cut men inside, and told them there were new orders, these from God: Thou shall not kill. The young men stopped the tanks. "The attack," said Billington, "never came."

You don't have to be extraordinarily gifted to help determine the history of a nation or even the world. There's no better evidence of that than found in scripture. Few of the heroes of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, are heroic at all. They did some really stupid things. But God still used them, just as God can use us. You don't have to be someone special to sow seeds of the kingdom.