PLANKTON HAS A COOL STORY. SAY WHAT?!

By Jessica Breazeale

I was recently intrigued…and then very inspired by plankton.

I know. I know. Of all the things to get a woman fired up, plankton was not on my list either. But here we are, and I’m not even a little bit sorry about it.

We’re currently reading Sadie Robertson’s Live Fearless together in my book club at the nursing home where I serve, and there’s a whole chapter titled “The Purpose of Plankton.” She talks about how she used to think of plankton as the lowest of the low. Bottom of the ocean’s pecking order. No shell, no fins, nothing that looks like it matters. If there was a popularity contest under the sea, plankton wouldn’t even get a nomination. Until she found out what they actually do.

Plankton rise. Every single day, they travel up toward the surface to reach the light, and

then they carry that light back down with them into the deep, dark water where it could never reach on its own. The thing she thought was the lowest of the low turns out to be the one hauling light into the dark, feeding an entire ecosystem that would starve without it.

That’s the whole message right there, if you ask me. But here’s the part that got me

even more — plankton don’t get to pick their current either. They can’t fight the water.

They go wherever it carries them. So the very thing that looks like proof they don’t

matter — small, drifting, no say over where they end up — is the same thing God uses to get His light exactly where it needs to go. Their weakness isn’t a flaw in the plan. It’s

part of the delivery system.

Because I know what it is to feel like the lowest of the low. I imagine some of the sweet

folks I sit with in this nursing home ministry know it even better than I do — tucked away in a room, feeling forgotten, carried along by a current they didn’t choose. A diagnosis. A body that won’t cooperate. A season nobody would pick for themselves. It’s easy to believe that if you can’t steer your own life anymore, you must not have much left to offer.

But nobody carries light into the dark by staying comfortable in the light. You have to go up and get it first, and then let yourself be carried — wherever that current takes you —straight into somebody else’s darkness. An hour of prayer nobody sees. A kind word to a nurse having a hard shift. A life still reaching for the Light in a body that’s stopped reaching for much else. That’s not a small job. That’s the job.

I think about Lazarus coming out of that tomb into the light after four days in the dark. I

think about the women who walked into a dark garden at dawn and were the first to

carry the news that Light had won. God has never been shy about handing His brightest news to the ones the world assumed were the lowest of the low — or the ones who never got to choose their own current.

Head up to get some light to take it to where it’s needed

So if you’ve ever felt like plankton — overlooked, unremarkable, swept along by

something you didn’t pick — take heart. You may be exactly the one built to go up, get

the Light, and let the current carry it straight to somebody sitting in the dark today.

Reading this one with my book club last week — if you’ve got Sadie’s book, I’d

love to hear what stopped you in your tracks. If you don’t have this book, go get it! I found it for $1 at Milltown Mall in Wesson.

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