The Arrow Nobody Wanted to Fire

In 2009, a high school counselor in Baltimore told Howard Schultz's story to a room of discouraged seniors. Schultz grew up in the Bayview Housing Projects in Brooklyn — no health insurance, no safety net, a father who cycled through dead-end jobs. Nobody in his family had ever attended college. He later described feeling like a kid the world had already forgotten, sharpened by hardship but kept hidden in a drawer nobody bothered to open.

Schultz went on to build Starbucks into a global company, but the part most people miss is what he did with it. He created one of the first major corporations to offer full health insurance to part-time workers — the very coverage his own family never had. His vision was never just about coffee. It was about making sure no child watched their father come home broken the way he did.

Isaiah 49 gives us a servant who feels the same ache — "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing." Yet the Almighty had been shaping him from the womb, forging him like a polished arrow kept hidden in a quiver, waiting for the right moment. And when God finally reveals His purpose, it is staggeringly larger than the servant imagined: not just restoration for one nation, but light for all nations.

Your hiddenness is not God's neglect. It is His preparation. The arrow feels forgotten in the quiver — until the Almighty draws the bow.