1985 November/December issue Part 2

Moonless Seas

Some of you are perhaps feeling that you are voyaging just now on a moonless sea. Uncertainty surrounds you. There seem to be no signs to follow. Perhaps you feel about to be engulfed by loneliness. There is no one to whom you can speak of your need. Amy Carmichael wrote of such a feeling when, as a missionary of twenty-six, she had to leave Japan because of health, went to China for recuperation, but soon thought God

1985 November/December issue Part 1

Thanksgiving for What Is Given

Some people are substituting "Turkey Day" for Thanksgiving. I think it must be because they are not aware that there's anybody to thank, and the most important thing about the holiday is food. Christians know there is Somebody to thank, but often when we make a list of things to thank Him for we include only things we like. A bride can't get away with that. She writes a note to everybody, not only the rich uncle who gave the couple matching BMWs, but the poor aunt who gave them a crocheted toilet-paper cover. In other words, she has to express thanks for whatever she's received. Wouldn't that be a good thing for us to do with God? We are meant to give thanks "in everything," even if we're like the little girl who said she could think of a lot of things she'd rather have than eternal life. The mature Christian offers not just polite thanks but heartfelt thanks that springs from a far deeper source than his own pleasure.

1985 September/October issue Part 3

Letters

From Washington state: "I have felt in my heart since seventh grade that above all else I want to follow God. It might be hard or scary, but what better place to be than in God's arms when the road gets bumpy and dark? Thank you for encouraging me in this commitment."

From the midwest came a long letter, telling me the story of many ups and downs, off agains, on agains, with a certain man. "I read your book Passion and Purity, and vowed I would be that way ... For the last nine

1985 September/October issue Part 2

Disposable Children

A ruling of the internal Revenue Service now allows parents a tax exemption if a child intended for abortion lives for any length of time. The breathtakingly fancy mental footwork necessary to justify such action goes something like this: what was meant to be discarded is not a child. It is called a "p.o.c." (product of conception, which of course is what children and all the rest of us are). The bad news is that this disposable tissue, this mere scrap of Kleenex, turned out to be a child and (alas) was born. The good news is that you can get a tax exemption for a dependent child. The best news is that its dependence is only temporary. Call it a child, then, till you get your money. You need not go to the trouble of keeping it.

1985 September/October issue Part 1

How to Discover What God Wants

A young woman came in great perplexity to a Scottish preacher, asking how she could resolve the question of her own desires when they seemed to be in such contradiction to the will of God. He took out a slip of paper, wrote two words on it, handed it to her with the request that she sit down for ten minutes, ponder the words, cross out one of them, and bring the slip back to him.

1985 July/August issue Part 5

Questions and Answers

How do we reconcile God's promises for protection with the fact that so many evil things do happen in our lives? Can we believe God for protection?

This question comes up often, and no wonder, since there are many promises in the Bible about protection, including (especially in the Old Testament) physical protection. We must be careful to interpret Scripture with Scripture, and if we examine the record we find that God did not by any means always protect His people from harm. He has absolute power to keep us safe, both physically and spiritually, but His engineering of the universe made room for man's freedom to choose-that is, freedom to will to obey or to disobey Him.

1985 July/August issue Part 4

Notes from a

Grandmother's Diary

ELISABETH (age five): "Come outside, Granny. I want you to play with me."

GRANNY: "In a few minutes, sweetheart. I've got a few things to do here in the kitchen."

ELISABETH: "Oh, don't worry about all that housework, Granny. Leave it to Mama. She's used to it."

In Sunday School the children were singing "I've Got a Home in Glory-Land," with gestures. When they came to the stanza, "I took Jesus as my Savior, you take Him too!" Elisabeth, instead of pointing forward as everyone else did, pointed straight back over her shoulder at her eight-year-old brother, Walter.

1985 July/August issue Part 3

Child-Care

Business which is "old hat" in England is new and rapidly growing in America- the training of nannies, women whose profession is the care of other people's children. Most of the nannies are young, but it is of particular significance that many of them are middle-aged women who have left careers. They have had ample opportunity to find that the business world can be an awful bore, but, as one of them said, "Nothing is as interesting as babies." What a shame that the mothers of these children are out chasing money, freedom, power, a cosmopolitan lifestyle, or who-knows-what and missing out on the most demanding, consuming, rewarding, fulfilling, and certainly the most creative job in the world.

1985 July/August issue Part 2

A Sentimental journey

An invitation to speak for Missions in Focus Week at Wheaton College (Illinois) last April gave me an opportunity to live over again in vivid memory some important crises in my own student life. Edman Chapel is new since my time, but there were the same eager, earnest, hopeful, uncertain, longing, dubious, shy faces turned up to me that we turned up to chapel speakers in the 1940s.

1985 July/August issue Part 1

But Also to Suffer

Amy Carmichael once spent a day in solitude in a cave in Japan, wrestling in prayer over some secret matter which she never fully revealed to anyone. It seems she feared loneliness. The words which were given to her then in answer to her cry were Paul's to the Philippians when he was in prison and they were being persecuted: "Unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake" (Phil 1:29 AV). She understood then that the Lord was not promising escape from the thing she feared, but assurance that whatever He might allow of suffering in her life would be a privilege and a gift-a thing given to her to give to Him, something which she could expect would accompany her faith.

1985 May/June issue Part 5

Four Ways God
Answers Prayer

1. No, that's not the best for you.
2. No, not yet.
3. Yes, I thought you'd never ask.
4. Yes, and there is much more.

(from Linda Schuck, Phoenix)

1985 May/June issue Part 4

A Child's Prayer

I had already written the suggestion for prayer for one's children s future spouses when I received a letter from my son-in-law. "Your grandchildren are terrific. Christiana [who is three] was swept away by a wedding witnessed in Louisiana. Lying beside her last night when putting her to bed I asked, 'What'd you like best about the wedding?' She thought ... then said, 'The blue girls.' Then, in an awed whisper, 'When I get big, Daddy, I want to be a mama and get married!' Her little face just beamed. I said, 'Well, we'll have to pray that the Lord grows you up to be a big girl who marries the right Christian man.' And she said, very quickly, 'Pray now!' So we did!"

For Our Children

Father, hear us, we are praying,
Hear the words our hearts are saying,
We are praying for our children.
Keep them from the powers of evil, From the secret, hidden peril,
From the whirlpool that would suck them,
From the treacherous quicksand pluck them.
From the worldling's hollow gladness,
From the sting of faithless sadness,
Holy Father, save our children.
Through life's troubled waters steer them,
Through life's bitter battle cheer them, Father, Father, be Thou near them.
Read the language of our longing,
Read the wordless pleadings thronging, Holy Father, for our children.
And wherever they may bide,
Lead them Home at eventide.


(From Toward Jerusalem, Amy Carmichael)

1985 May/June issue Part 3

My Spiritual Mother

Katherine Morgan has been a missionary in Pasto, Colombia, for fifty years. She has been a friend of mine for thirty-four of those years and has done for me what Paul said Onesiphorus did for him: refreshed me often. Katherine's husband died when they had been married only six years, but she carried on their missionary work and reared their four little girls. To Katherine I owe more than I can ever tell. She more or less booted me to Ecuador. I was a missionary candidate without a field, didn't know quite how to find one, talked to her, and within months found myself in Quito. She had had me in her home many weekends, giving me previews of coming attractions-what not to expect from "supporters," what to expect from them, what to expect from Ecuadorians and from jungle Indians, what to take (a sense of humor, for one thing), what not to take (a sense of smell, a trunkful of inhibitions and Plymouth Brethren prejudices, an inflated idea of my own importance, and the notion that people are longing to hear the gospel).

1985 May/June issue Part 2

How Annoyances May
Be Vanquished

In John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Christian has a conversation with three women in the House Beautiful: Piety, Prudence, and Charity. He describes his journey and the reasons for it. Prudence questions him about temptation to dwell on the past. "Can you remember by what means you find your annoyances at times as if they were van-quished?" "Yes," says Christian, "when I think what I saw at the Cross, that will do it; and when I look upon my broidered coat,* that will do it, and when I look into the Roll* that I carry in my bosom, that will do it; and when my thoughts wax warm about whither I am going, that will do it." "And what is it makes you so desirous to go to Mount Zion?" "Why, there I hope to see Him alive that did hang dead on the Cross; and there I hope to be rid of all those things, that, to this day, are in me an annoyance to me; there they say there is no death, and there I shall dwell with such company as I like best. For, to tell you truth, I love Him, because I was by Him eased of my burden. And I am weary of my inward sickness; I would fain be where I shall die no more, and with the company that shall continually cry, Holy! holy! holy!"

*and tells of meeting Three Shining Ones at the foot of the Cross who give him a "broidered" coat (the righteousness of Christ) and a Roll (the Scriptures).