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willing

The little girl in 2 Kings 5:1-27 is a perfect example of how God uses ordinary people to further the good of his kingdom. Through the simple words of a slave girl to her mistress, Naaman, a powerful and influential man, not only was healed of his disease but came to testify that "there is no God in all the world except in Israel."

She didn't have formal training. She didn't have power or position. She didn’t even have her name recorded in this Bible story. In fact, it was daring of her to open her mouth and say the simple thing she had to say. Although she was a slave girl in a foreign land, she was willing to share what she believed. And she believed Elisha, the man of God, could heal her master of leprosy. She was available and willing...and that's all that was needed to change a life.

From The Grandmother's Bible

Devotion by
Barbara Johnson

Any comments or testimonies today?

It All Boils Down to Your Values

My experience has confirmed the wisdom of so much of what the Bible teaches. In my career I have seen how often ego and selfishness are the root of conflict in people's lives. Too many people are more concerned with their reputations and what other people think than they are about the best course of action or what risks they really ought to take.

It all boils down to your values. If your priority is to look good in front of people, your life will take a different direction than if your priority is to use the talents God has given you to make a positive difference in the world. Such values will influence what risks you choose to take.

—Ben Carson, MD, Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk

Any comments or testimonies today?

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My Prescription in a Dangerous World

by Ben Carson, MD

As boys, whenever my brother, Curtis, or I offered our mother an excuse for failing to accomplish something—whenever we complained about some seemingly insurmountable problem, whenever we grew weary or discouraged by some obstacle in the road of life, or especially whenever we whined about anything—she always offered the same response. She would get a puzzled look on her face and ask, “Do you have a brain?”

The implication was crystal clear: If you have a brain, use it! It’s all you need to overcome any problem!

My mother instilled in me a deep respect for the potential of the human brain, and that respect has deepened over the years to an attitude I can only describe as awe. Every time I open a child’s head and see a brain, I marvel at the mystery: This is what makes every one of us who we are. This is what holds all our memories, all our thoughts, all our dreams. This is what makes us different from each other in millions of ways. And yet if I could expose my brain and your brain and place them side by side, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference—even though we might be very different people. That still amazes me.

Inside each human brain are billions and billions of complex interconnections, neurons and synapses, which science has only barely begun to understand. When you add to that the mystery of mind and spirit, the human brain becomes a laboratory so vast and intricate you could work in it for a millennium and hardly scratch the surface.

Whenever I speak to audiences, I try to inspire them to consider the power and implications of such potential. I tell them that no computer network on earth can come close to the capacity of the average human brain. This resource that each one of us has is a tremendous gift from God—the most complex organ system in the entire universe. Your brain can take in two million bits of information per second. I tell audiences of several thousand people that if I could bring one person up onstage, have her look out at the crowd for one second, and lead her away, fifty years later I could perform an operation, take off the cranial bone, put in some depth electrodes, and stimulate the appropriate area of her brain, and she could remember not only where everyone was sitting, but what they were wearing.

That’s how amazing and complex the human brain is. It’s literally mind-boggling.

When I speak to students I sometimes illustrate this further by asking how many of them remember what they had for lunch in the cafeteria that day. (If I’m addressing accountants, I’ll ask who remembers the last time they did a sum total of values.) The point is to get them to raise their hands.

Then I run through a rapid-fire riff something like this: “Let’s think about what your brain had to do when I asked that question. First, the sound waves had to leave my lips, travel through the air into your external auditory meatus, travel down to your tympanic membrane, and set up a vibratory force that traveled across the ossicles of your middle ear to the oval and round windows, generating a vibratory force in the endolymph, which mechanically distorts the microcilia, converting mechanical energy to electrical energy, which traveled across the cochlear nerve to the cochlear nucleus at the ponto-medullary junction, from there to the superior olivary nucleus, ascending bilaterally up the brain stem through the lateral lemniscus to the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate nucleus, then across the thalamic radiations to the posterior temporal lobes to begin the auditory processing, from there to the frontal lobes, coming down the tract of Vicq d’Azur, retrieving the memory from the medial hippocampal structures and the mammillary bodies, back to the frontal lobes to start the motor response at the Betz cell level, coming down the cortico-spinal tract, across the internal capsule into the cerebral peduncle, descending to the cervicomedullary decussation into the spinal cord gray matter, synapsing, and going out to the neuromuscular junction, stimulating the nerve and the muscle so you could raise your hand.”

Of course, that’s the simplified version. If I were to get into all of the inhibitory and coordinating influences, I would be talking for hours about this one thing.

The point is, we can decry the dangers we face or ignore them or even allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear.

Or we can ask ourselves, do we have a brain?

Then let’s use this incredible tool God has given us to assess the risks that we face every day. We have the means to analyze risks and decide which are worth taking and which should be avoided.

Do you have a brain? Then use it.

That’s the secret.

That’s my simple but powerful prescription for life, love, and success in a dangerous world.

From Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk by Ben Carson, MD

Running Which Race?

The way in which we measure our standard of living indicates the race we have decided to run. The American Christian faces a true dilemma. We can choose the rat race, or we can choose to not love this world and "throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and...run with perseverance the race marked out for us" (Hebrews 12:1-2).

We each make our own choice, but the pressure to make the wrong choice is intense and should not be underestimated. As my first Bible study leader was fond of saying, "You can choose your way, but you can't choose the result." The cause and effect nature of our choice brands us.

—Patrick Morley, The Man in the Mirror

Any comments or testimonies today?

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Embrace Your Passion

We each have a destiny, a legend that only we can live. To embrace it is scary and dangerous, and most choose not to. Most put it off until tomorrow, until after high school, until after college, until after establishing a financial base. Can't they see? We only get one shot at this life. Tomorrow may never come. The time is now! Not to drop everything and move to Africa, but to find the passion that is inside us and embrace it, to listen to its subtle whispers.

—Erik Mirandette, The Only Road North

Any comments or testimonies today?

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Move Toward What Pierces Your Soul

The tendency for most of us when we encounter stuff that creates disease and frustration in our souls is to push it away. And fast! We feel the discomfort of holy discontentedness coming on, and reflexively we want to medicate it. We want to recoil in disgust at the dreadful realities surrounding us. We want to head to Blockbuster to rent another movie just to stay distanced from it. But the truth is this: the best thing you can do is to move toward your area of holy discontent until you have clear direction from God as to what action you should take to resolve it. For example, if the plight of the poor becomes your holy discontent, then increase your exposure to the poor. I'm serious here: Move toward the poor, not away from them.

—Bill Hybels, Holy Discontent: Fueling the Fire That Ignites Personal Vision

Any comments or testimonies today?

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Staying Focused on the Mission

Saturday I donned my camouflage and safety gear, then joined a group of guys in the woods. We weren’t there to enjoy the beauty of the outdoors. Rather, we experienced an adrenaline-filled morning of playing capture the flag—with paintball markers.

Traveling at 250 feet per second, the marble-sized balls can leave a considerable welt, particularly at close range. (Yes, I have my share of welts.) Aside from the welts, and perhaps a little wounded pride for getting picked off by a kid, I went home in one piece with a few good stories to tell.

As followers of Jesus, our battles aren’t so easy or safe. We have a spiritual opponent with nothing to lose who doesn’t play fair. He uses live ammo, and is ultimately gunning for our souls and the souls of those in our sphere of influence. But we’re not on the defensive; we’re on the offensive in this war, and we have the weapons (Hebrews 4:12; 2 Corinthians 10:3-5), armor (Ephesians 6:11-17), power (Ephesians 6:10), protection (Isaiah 54:17), and fellow soldiers (Ecclesiastes 4:12) to win this fight.

It’s not about us; it’s about the mission. Let’s strive together to keep the focus on advancing God’s kingdom and his righteousness in our lives and in the lives of others.

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Between Teeth and Bullets

by Erik Mirandette

“We need a welder. Where are we?” I asked, frustrated and angry that one more pleading with God had gone unanswered. No sooner than we started to make some real progress toward our destination, something else broke and delayed us again.

Kris looked at a more general map of the region and pointed to the middle of a big green area south of Mpanda labeled Katavi National Park and Game Reserve.

“It looks like we’re right about here.”

The words of the man from the gas station at Sumbawanga began to ring in my head. “The lions, dey eat you. If you don’t stop, and off the road at night, maybe you make it.”

Here it was just before sunset, and we were stuck indefinitely right in the middle of a national park that was famous for lion spotting. Apparently the most unique and attractive quality of this particular stretch was that at night the lions all came to the road. Because it was so wet in this jungle, and normally lions live in dryer brush, the beasts traveled on the road at night to avoid having to walk through the tall wet grass when the dew settled.

“Even if we could get it fixed tonight, we can’t carry all our gear on just two bikes” noted Alex. “And look at your bike, Erik! The seam of your duffel’s ripped out.”

“What?” I looked, and sure enough the back of my bag was wide open and I had been spilling clothes and even a couple tools for the last, who-knew how far. It must have torn when I crashed. I couldn’t believe we didn’t notice it sooner.

“Perfect, absolutely perfect. Could things get any better?” The situation looked grim. We were stranded—out of food, out of water. And I was tired of begging God.

No one was excited about spending another night in the bush. We were already dead tired, and now it looked like it would be at least another day until we would be able to eat and rest.

Just as we were preparing to dig in for the night, we noticed something. Through the quickly fading twilight, we saw a speck of white bouncing down the road in the distance.

“What’s that?” At first I could barely make it out. “Could it be a truck?” We hadn’t seen another vehicle on this road since Sumbawanga.

It got bigger and bigger. We recognized it. It was a Land Cruiser! Kris stepped into the road and stopped the vehicle while Alex and I rushed to the window.

I couldn’t believe it. Here we were in the middle of the jungle, stranded, hopeless, all alone, and out of nowhere comes a man who not only spoke English but was also willing to help us. He might as well have been an angel. It was still going to be a long night; we had at least 100 km to go and we were already nearly beaten to death. But at least we would not have to fight off lions. We had hope and we had a goal. Sometimes that’s all you need. If we were lucky, we would be able to rest in a bed tonight—with a full stomach.

The road was grueling. We had to battle rock, sand, and ruts every kilometer. Our stallions were as broken and tired as we were. Alex’s bike was the first to go. Kris and I were riding side by side talking (something that could only be done at low speeds) when Alex hit something in the road, swerved sharp to the right, and took a nasty crash into a big hole. I rushed over to him and ditched my bike. He was down about six feet with his foot pinned under his bike. He was struggling for air. I jumped down to him as Kris lifted the bike off his foot.

“Hey, you all right?”

He choked a couple of breaths.

“Yeah. Just knocked the wind out of me. Give me a sec.”

He breathed, just breathed and nothing more, for a few moments. Then he slowly got up. It looked to me like he hit his head pretty hard.

“Whoa, what was that? I was just driving straight, I hit a little rut, and my bike shot out from under me.”

Kris inspected Alex’s bike while I inspected Alex. Nothing was broken, but he did have a bad headache and felt like vomiting. It looked like a concussion, but to be honest, Kris and I both felt similar, what with hardly anything to eat or drink all day.

“Hey, Erik, look at this,” Kris shouted.

Alex’s steering was so loose that the bolt holding it together was ready to fall off. In addition to that, his exhaust pipe had broken off and his front rim had been bent badly in the crash. Countless other bolts had vibrated loose as well.

Sbaa and his driver had noticed that we weren’t behind them and turned around. We took our tools and tightened everything as best as we could given the circumstances and inspected the other bikes. My steering was also loose and several bolts were ready to fall out at the next bump in the road. Kris’s didn’t look any worse than it had a couple hours earlier, but that wasn’t really saying much. We threw Alex’s hot exhaust pipe into the back of the Land Cruiser as Sbaa nervously scanned for lions and elephants. Alex was hurting; he took my bike. It was in the best shape of the three. Kris took Alex’s bike, which still sort of ran, just very loudly. I rode in back on Kris’s bike, acting as a sort of cleanup man. We had a hurt rider on a good bike, a good rider on a hurt bike, and me trailing, ready to pick up whichever of the two broke down first.

An elephant trumpeted to my left, not a stone’s throw away, yet I couldn’t see it so black was the night. On the ground I saw fresh lion tracks in the sand. Animals were there, on either side of us, before and behind. We could sense their presence, hear their savage screams; we knew they were watching us as we slowly passed, barely moving down the road. The bikes couldn’t take the terrain any faster in the condition they were in. For the first time on our journey I was afraid. Not startled, like how a charging elephant will make you feel. I mean a bonechilling, deep fear. I was afraid of the dark, of the monsters hiding there, of another crash, of a million things waiting to harm us—but it was more than that. Sure, I was aware of the immediate dangers we were facing, but my fear came from beyond. I had a disconcerting sense that all was not well. We were unwelcome strangers in this place, with no idea how much longer we had to travel before we reached Mpanda.

We lost all concept of time; minutes dragged on for hours; hours took days to pass. The sun should have come up by now. I hung over the handlebars far behind the rest, waiting for the next crash. Alex must have been so tired. I could barely keep going and I hadn’t taken that fall. Kris was negotiating not only his fatigue, but also a bike that threatened to stop running at any moment. Mpanda became a myth, a fairytale in my mind. It was a place that existed only in dreams. I didn’t actually expect to ever arrive.

But then peeking through the jungle was a light. At first I questioned whether or not it was even real. It was just a glimpse, just a spark. The road wrapped around one more bend, and sure enough there it was: Mpanda, our refuge, our rest. We followed the white Land Cruiser through the small town, down dark dusty roads to a guesthouse. The Good Samaritan did all the negotiating; we merely sat on our bikes reassuring each other that our journey was over for the day.

“You have a room here.”

Like lifeless zombies we grabbed our bags out of the back of the Land Cruiser and lugged them down the narrow hallway to a room with two beds. Heaven. Here we would be able to rest for a few days, nurse ourselves back to health, and get our bikes ready for another demanding stretch of road.

“We must go now; the restaurant”—there was only one in Mpanda—“is about to close,” Sbaa said to us.

We compliantly got back on our bikes. Alex, too beat to ride, climbed onto the back of mine. We followed our friend to the restaurant and ate as much gristly goat meat and rice as we could fit into our stomachs.

Back at the guesthouse, we slept soundly in our beds for what was left of the night and through most of the next day.

I awoke with the sun, already high above the horizon, shining through our window. Alex and Kris were still lying peacefully on their mats, Alex just to my side; Kris across the room seven feet away. I grabbed my journal and stepped out into a paved courtyard littered with cheap white plastic lawn furniture. Immediately I felt uneasy as several concerned eyes looked up to meet my gaze. They said nothing, nor I to them as I walked out of the guesthouse and into the dusty side lot where we had left our tired and broken bikes the night before.

Kris and I explored the area surrounding the guesthouse in search of something to eat. A stand selling fresh sugarcane was the only thing open.

“What’s going on here? Why is everything closed?”

“I don’t know. It’s kinda creepy."

A nicely dressed man briskly walked out of the guesthouse and was passing us indifferently on the street, obviously not in the mood to talk.

“Hello. Excuse me, sir.”

“Yes?”

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes,” he answered, visibly annoyed.

“What’s going on here? Why is everyone so upset?”

“You don’t know what happened the last night?” he asked. “The gunman come tru and kill the people!” And quickly the man explained to us what had happened the night prior.

Just after sunset, a man came wandering up the street with a loaded AK-47 and a bottle of booze, apparently wanting money and some form of transportation. He casually walked up to a taxi driver sitting in his car waiting for the next customer to emerge from the restaurant, lifted his gun to the open window, and shot the driver right through the head. People started to run as he pulled the lifeless driver out of his car. The gunman looked around him for his next victim. The people in the restaurant watched helplessly through the window as he stared each of them down, surveying the scene, and then strolled over to a nearby shop. Inside the shop, the owner was hiding behind the counter. A couple of rounds into the old man and he died quietly. The gunman helped himself to the money and whatever else pleased him and wandered back over to the now empty taxi and drove away.

“This happened last night?” Kris asked in amazement. “Yes, it happen just last night. The people is dead going to be buried now. TOO MUCH this happen!” The man turned around and without a good-bye continued down the street.

“Kris, we would have been in that restaurant last night at sunset.”

He just stared at me, speechless.

From The Only Road North by Erik Mirandette

Living Beyond Yourself

by Erik Rees

At about 2 a.m. on Saturday, March 12, 2005, Ashley Smith decided to drive to a local market to buy some cigarettes. On the way, she thought happily about picking up her five-year-old daughter from a church event later that morning. She had no idea her quiet life was about to change forever.

Back home, Ashley got out of her car—and was immediately accosted by a man with a gun. Hours earlier, rape suspect Brian Nichols allegedly had shot his way out of an Atlanta courthouse, leaving a judge and three others dead in his wake. He held Ashley at gunpoint, forced his way into her home, and tied her up.

The next seven hours felt like seven years. Because of the televised jailbreak, Ashley knew Brian was wanted for cold-blooded killings. She struggled to control her fear, sure she was going to die.

When her husband, Mack, was murdered in 2001, Ashley was a Christian but living far from Jesus. After Mack’s death, the drug crystal methamphetamine formed a strong hold on her. Eventually, her life was in such disarray that she gave custody of her daughter, Paige, to her aunt.

When Brian Nichols took her hostage, she had started rebuilding her life—working and going to school, getting her own apartment, and looking forward to regaining custody of Paige. Every day she read a chapter from The Purpose Driven® Life. Yet, though she didn’t use drugs constantly anymore, she still struggled with addiction. When Brian asked Ashley if she had marijuana, she said she didn’t—but she offered him the crystal methamphetamine she did have. Nichols asked her to use the drug with him.

“I really didn’t think God was going to give me another chance,” Ashley said later. “So what I did was surrender completely to him and say, ‘You probably are going to take me home tonight, and before you take me home, I need to get right with you.’ In doing that, God did give me another chance.”

Ashley recognized Brian as a man desperately in need of Christ. He needed to know what Jesus looked like and to experience his limitless grace. She allowed the Holy Spirit to take control. She served Brian pancakes and they talked, just like normal people do. They talked, among other things, about the Bible and The Purpose Driven® Life. Brian asked Ashley to read it to him, so she picked up where she’d left off in her own daily reading. It turned out to be Day 33: “How Real Servants Act.” Its focus is on living your life others-centered, allowing God to interrupt your life for the sake of someone else.

Ashley told Brian how she’d been widowed and explained that if he hurt her, her daughter would be without either a daddy or mommy. Quietly, gently, the Holy Spirit acted. Brian hung curtains for Ashley, then let her leave to pick up her daughter. She called 9-1-1 and Brian Nichols surrendered peacefully to police.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once observed, “It is part of the discipline of humility that we must not spare our hand where it can perform a service and that we do not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.” Ashley got an object lesson that night in exactly what Bonhoeffer meant. Whether we’ve yielded our lives to God or not, this much is true: our schedules really are not our own. When we put them in God’s hands, we may discover—as Ashley Smith did that night—that interruptions, no matter how unwelcome, can be turned into opportunities to minister.

The star of this story is not Ashley Smith. The central character is a heart—specifically, a servant’s heart. Because Ashley chose to think “others-centered,” rather than “self-centered,” her courage shined powerfully under a pressure most of us will never know—in spite of her own human weakness. Faith gave her the strength to serve someone others might have shunned or cowered from in fear for their lives.

Ashley modeled the words of Jesus to his disciples: “But among you it should be quite different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must become your slave. For even I, the Son of Man, came here not to be served but to serve others, and to give my life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:26 – 28, NLT). Christ made it clear that servanthood is not only an honorable characteristic, it is mandatory for one who claims to be his disciple.

Devotional writer Gerald Hartis says, “Ministry is what we leave in our wake as we follow Jesus.” By choosing the servant nature of Christ, Ashley Smith left in her wake a powerful testament to his power. You too will leave a wake as you strive to serve others through your S.H.A.P.E.

Someone once said, “Your theology is what you are when the talking stops and the action starts.” What we believe is demonstrated by what we do, not just by what we say. Good intentions are not enough—they must be followed by deeds that demonstrate they are true.

As Jesus traveled, he served—helping, healing, and laying a hand whenever there was a need. He humbled himself in front of his own followers when he washed their feet—one of the lowest positions a person in that time could assume. He even took the role of servant all the way to death—obeying God’s will in spite of what it would cost him personally.

God is not looking for perfectly manicured hands. His delight is in weathered and callused hands that demonstrate a “whatever it takes” attitude. That was precisely the challenge Paul issued to the church at Philippi: “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Philippians 2:4–7).

Ashley’s story can motivate us to maximize our lives by living beyond ourselves. It’s not likely any of us will find ourselves in a situation like hers, but as believers in Christ we can count on a lifetime of opportunities to serve others and share our faith. Jesus wants us to make our faith known through serving others, like Ashley did for Brian—and like a man we know only as “the Good Samaritan” did thousands of years ago.

From S.H.A.P.E.: Finding and Fulfilling Your Unique Purpose for Life by Erik Rees

Editor's Note: Ashley Smith's full story is chronicled in the book Unlikely Angel: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage Hero.