The message below was sent to me through FamilyLife in December of '08. I've kept it tucked away in my inbox because I was so blown away by the truths in it. It is written by Ney Bailey. Ney has been on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ for more than 46 years! She has written an incredible book called Faith is Not a Feeling , another piece of her writing that had a profound impact on me. Today I found myself searching through the stuff in my inbox to see if any of it needed to go. When I came across this I thought it would be wonderful to share with you and appropriate for the times that we live in now. Enjoy :)
I’ll never forget the time I invited Elisabeth Elliot to come speak to our women who were ministering in Eastern Europe when the Iron Curtain was still up and the countries were closed. The conference was in September, and 75 of us were meeting near Vienna in a classroom with tiered seating and desks. I was seated by Elisabeth during a break when an obviously anxious young woman came and stood in front of her. With a voice full of angst and stress she began to explain her situation to Elisabeth:
Woman: “My husband and I moved here from the states with our two children in January, and we have looked and looked and looked for a house to live in and after all these months we have been unable to find anything! We have been forced to live with first one family for a few months….and now we have been with yet another family for several months. School is about to start again, and we still haven’t found a house!”
Elisabeth (calmly): “You must not need a house”
That was the last response the young woman expected Elisabeth to have after her elaborate explanation of desperately needing a house and not finding one. I, too, was initially a bit taken aback by Elisabeth’s words.
Woman (astonished, mouth open, quizzically): “I must not need a house?”
Elisabeth (authoritatively): “You must not need a house… ‘MY God shall supply ALL YOUR NEEDS according to His riches in Christ Jesus’ (emphasis Elisabeth’s). If you needed a house, you would have a house.”
Woman (stunned): “I don’t have a house because I don’t need a house?” “I don’t have a house because I don’t need a house…I don’t have a house because I don’t need a
house…” (I was seeing her change before my very eyes as she repeated these unbelievable words…convincing herself and coming to the truth of Elisabeth’s words as she repeated them over and over.) “Wait till I tell my husband we don’t have a house because we don’t NEED a house! I’m going to go phone him right now!”
She had come to Elisabeth full of anxiety and puzzlement. She walked away in awe of the truth of what she had heard and received into her heart.
When I saw the woman again a couple years later I asked her about that incident. She said not long after the encounter with Elisabeth they found a wonderful house. But she realized in retrospect that God had used the time of not having a house and living in the homes of others to acclimate her and her family to a new culture. Those families had become some of their dearest friends and are to this day. God had known what they needed the most.
Chuck Swindoll writes: “God’s plans are beyond our understanding and too deep to explain. Perhaps God doesn’t explain Himself because knowing and understanding His way may not help us all that much. Stop and ask yourself: Does knowing why really help? Is the pain removed by knowing the cause? Ours is a world filled with devastating catastrophes.”
This includes terrorism, political turmoil and the recent financial ‘earthquakes’ affecting us all.
Chuck continues: “What bothers us is that He doesn’t act as we think He ought to act. He doesn’t do what our earthly dads would have done in similar circumstances. While I’m at it, where was He when His own Son was crucified? To the surprise of many, He was there all the time working out His divine plan for our salvation. As the process was running its course, Jesus’ own disciples didn’t get it—they were the most disillusioned people on the planet. Do you remember what they were thinking? They were wondering how in the world they could have believed in a hoax. From their perspective, their Master’s death didn’t make any sense."
Near the end of the book of Job, after all of the losses and calamities that devastated Job’s life, “do you know what Job finally sees? Job sees God, and that is enough. He doesn’t see answers. He is to the place where he doesn’t need answers. He has gotten a glimpse of the Almighty, and that is sufficient.” 1
Job trusts God with his life—all that He is and all that he has and doesn’t have.
As the difficult year of 2008 comes to an end, may we be like my friend who began to trust God without the house she thought she needed and may we be like Job who trusted God with His losses. May we not be ungrateful for what we don’t have…but may we have His grace to be thankful for what we do have.
And may we remember that God’s love for us “is in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen."2
1. Chuck Swindoll, Great Days with the Great Lives, p. 279, W Publishing Group,©2005.
2. J.B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English, Geoffrey Bles Publisher, p 361, ©1959.
