Sarah Best: Nothing is impossible with God

Today's post is written by Sarah Best. It is the story of a miracle. David has known Sarah and Luke for some years through their faithful participation at Trinity Christian Church in Owen Sound. My husband Luke and I met in 2011 when his father introduced us, keenly sensing that we were a ‘match made in Heaven.’ He was right. Our first date was a little bit awkward but a lot of fun. By 2012 we were married and eager to begin our lives together as a family. My entire life I longed for the day that I would be a mother. It was a desire that grew gradually and intensified once Luke and I began our lives together. I was 28 years old, secure and confident in our marriage being entirely of the Lord, and hopeful to see our family grow.

Long before we met I struggled with some reproductive health issues. I had two surgeries to remove endometriosis adhesions and was advised to stay on the birth control pill to ease the symptoms. Months before we were married I went off the birth control pill to allow my body time to return to its natural state. The months passed by, and things did not seem right with my body. We were advised that if we wanted to get pregnant we would have to induce ovulation with drugs. For four months I took Clomid (a drug to force ovulation), which ended up being a horrible experience. My body did not respond well to the medication. I kept going because we were holding onto the hope that this drug would work and that we would have at least a fair shot at getting pregnant. Each month we would take a pregnancy test with high hopes that it would be positive. Each time we saw a negative result we trudged on for another month on Clomid. With four failed attempts to conceive with this medication we went back to the specialist.

After some further testing we learned that my husband had some significant fertility issues himself, and that our treatments would now involve inducing ovulation with stronger medications AND further treatment procedures. We hesitated with this, questioning whether it was right to take such measures to conceive. We asked the Lord for His guidance and decided that we would trust our physicians and continue with the treatment. After a couple of attempts at this regimen we decided to stop. It was a very difficult time, looking back at all the ups and downs, the negative pregnancy tests and the financial loss we endured with the treatments. The clinic we attended was 2 hours from home as there are no such treatment options in our area. I had to drive to Kitchener every day for at least 2 weeks each month for blood work and other testing. The clinic visits were about 15 minutes long, then I would drive back home again. I remember the car rides that felt like they would never end and the drives that were over in a blink while my mind spun and squeezed all the information I received. I hung onto all the words the specialists said, some positive but mostly not. I had to pull over a few times to wait for the tears to pass so I could keep driving. It was a lonely and extremely painful season. Again, each negative pregnancy test was extremely disappointing. It was as if somehow I felt that my great efforts in the process would yield different results. My prayer was that our diligence and determination would meet the Lords favour and we would conceive. But this was not the way.

We took a break from the treatments so we could decide what to do next. The last and only option recommended by our specialist was to have another surgery (namely ovarian ‘drilling’) to remove some cysts on my ovaries and any endometriosis that had grown since the last one. We saw this as a last resort and figured we had nothing to lose. The doctors said it was a fairly straightforward procedure and that it would be beneficial. It occurred to us that this might be the end of our own attempts to ‘fix’ the problem considering how difficult we found the previous endeavours, but we did not anticipate what this last effort would entail.

The surgery itself was a breeze. We made the 2 hour drive home that afternoon thinking everything went great. My ovaries were ‘drilled,’ endometriosis removed and I was relatively pain free. That night the first of many complications arose from surgery that lead to 2 months of very hard times. Without going into detail, I can honestly say that there were moments when I felt like I was at my absolute lowest. The physical pain was only the beginning. What hurt the most was that the surgery was deemed unsuccessful. It was as if my reproductive system was just shut down. Ironically, so was the rest of me. I cried out to the Lord day after day, angry, afraid and in pain. I couldn't understand WHY all this had happened. A friend of mine patiently listened while I asked all these questions. One important thing that she said was to be honest with the Lord in how I feel. She said, “We have no right to be angry with God, but you have the privilege of coming to Him as His child, and pouring out your heart… all of it.” She also told me that “Some days you will have faith, and others you won’t. When you do, keep ASKING the Lord for a child. Come to Him in faith when you can. Come to Him in your brokenness when you can’t. Just come to Him.” She pointed out that no time is wasted in our walk with the Lord. She encouraged me to see that we are always moving forward and that this is a process that we walk through that WILL result in growth, not destruction. So as much as it hurts, and although we sometimes can’t see it… we are always moving forward.

Luke remained a strong loving and supportive partner throughout the entire experience. He listened, encouraged and cared for me when I felt very low. Before we were married he had a dream that we were walking through a supermarket. With us was a little girl with long dark hair sitting in the grocery cart. He says that this dream is what prompted him to propose to me when he did. He felt that it was the Lord’s way of showing him what was ahead, and a ‘nudge’ to take the next step of marriage. Luke held onto this dream the entire time. Even after the surgery, when I was at times certain there was no hope, he held fast to this promise from God. I would sometimes feel frustrated that he still believed in something that seemed so impossible, but he reminded me that our God is the God of the IMPOSSIBLE.

One morning while I was praying, I came to a point where I realized that the most important thing I can learn in this lifetime is to cling to Jesus. I laid in bed and thought to myself that anything in this world can be taken from me; any dream, any hope or any ‘thing,’ but I would be OK as long as I had Jesus. I became more aware of the fierce love of my Father God, strong and steady, never failing. Never disappearing as my own father had. In those moments when I felt pain taking over my body and my heart I felt His presence like never before. It was at my lowest points that His grip was the tightest. Like when a parent walks through a frightening or dangerous place with their child, He held me close. And when I felt like I was sinking further, He squeezed tighter. There was an ongoing dialogue between my heart and the Lord where He would repeatedly ask me if I trusted Him. Through both times of hope and sorrow His Spirit gave me the faith to reply, “Yes.” One verse I came to stand upon was this:

“Though the fig tree does not bud, and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will REJOICE in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my saviour. The sovereign Lord is my strength; He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, He enables me to tread on the heights” Habakkuk 3:17-19.

Shortly before we went on a winter vacation, we took some time to talk and pray about our situation. We had the option of starting fertility treatments again in hopes that the surgery would have my body in a more favourable state. We agreed that if this is what the specialist recommended it wouldn't hurt. However, I felt finished with all of that. I couldn't bear to go through all the testing, the treatments, the poking and prodding. I felt in my heart that those efforts were futile. I truly believed that if we were to have a child it would be a result of the Lord’s power. Mind you, I was doubtful it would happen. I just knew that all other options were of no use.

One morning while we were on a sunny southern vacation together we ran into a dilemma with our finances. We were in a real pinch and we needed the Lord’s help. That morning in our hotel room we felt frustrated and afraid. We came before the Lord and prayed for our finances… and without any forethought we prayed for a baby. For the first time in a long time we prayed that the Lord would open my womb. I unexpectedly had the faith in that moment and we stepped out in that. Yes, my body was still apparently ‘shut down,’ but that didn't change our prayer.

When we returned from our vacation we found out that the financial dilemma was resolved. We thanked God, and were also very grateful for a restful and rejuvenating time away together.

About two weeks weeks after our trip I came down with the flu. I missed a couple of days of work and hunkered down at home. For a reason I cannot explain I decided to take a home pregnancy test. I had an abundant supply of these little sticks from when we were doing the treatments. I took this test for about the hundredth time and expected to see the same result. But this time there were two pink lines. I was sure that I was seeing things. I came to Luke with butterflies in my belly and asked him “Are there two lines here or one?” He confirmed, “There are two lines… what does that mean?”

Five seconds later he drove to the drug store to buy a fancy digital pregnancy test, because surely this little stick was wrong!! I held my breath as I took the second test. It took thirty seconds to result, and that was the longest thirty seconds of my life. After the wait the little screen finally showed it: “Pregnant, 1-2 weeks.” We looked at each other in amazement. I could hardly breathe. We both slumped into a heap on the floor and wept. We held each other and thanked the Lord over and over again. Here we sat with the evidence of a complete miracle.

Nine months later we held the evidence of that miracle in our arms. A beautiful, healthy baby girl with dark hair came from my body and squirmed on my chest. She looked up at me with these bright gorgeous eyes and I felt my heart leave me completely. She breathed her first breath and the promise that Lord gave Luke was born.

We look back today and we see so many things. The journey was not easy, and there were moments when we had great doubt. But God was gracious to us and worked through this doubt, teaching us to trust in His promises. He KNEW all that time that one day we would come to this place, where we would hold our child and kiss her cheeks. He knew that when I would study Lucy’s little face, and feel her soft chubby hands grasp mine that I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Because every step of the journey DID bring us forward. Maybe not in the way that I had hoped for… but we grew in the struggle and I saw my Father’s passionate heart in a new way through the trials. And last but not least, He knew that I would be here today reminding my brothers and sisters that nothing is impossible with God!!!

The hand on my shoulder

Ten years ago yesterday, an amazing and totally irreplaceable man left my life and passed into the presence of his Saviour. The last words I heard my dad say were these: “All I want to do is to be with Jesus.” Colin Campbell came to Christ as a boy in the dark days of the Depression through the preaching of Plymouth Brethren street evangelists in the awful slums of Glasgow in which he was raised. The street preachers went out and preached the Gospel to the tenement buildings the poorest people lived in, in the hope that some inside would listen. Sitting at the window several floors up, a teenaged boy heard the Gospel, came down and received Christ as his Saviour on the street. He served the Lord faithfully and without wavering for over seventy years. At his funeral, my mum and my older brother noted how in the sixty-three years of his marriage, he was never heard to have uttered a profanity or raised his voice in anger.

Dad won a scholarship to a private school in Glasgow, but was mocked because he was poor, and never went back. Instead, he went to sea in the Merchant Marine at the age of 15. His father was blind and his mother was crippled. They had absolutely nothing. While he was at sea, he witnessed to his ship-mates and led at least one to Christ, a drunkard whose life was totally transformed and was still serving the Lord thirty-five years later. While he was on a long voyage, his father, whom he deeply loved, died of pneumonia. He never found out until he got home. At 19, with war approaching, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force. When courting my mum, he would walk ten miles home to the base because there was no other way to get there.  On his first night in the barracks, where several dozen men slept in the same room, he followed his usual practice of kneeling at the side of his bed to pray.  One man swore and threw his shoe at him.  One of the biggest men in the room said if he ever did that to the boy again he would live to regret it.  Dad was unashamed of his Saviour and willing to pay the price.  And that's how he lived the rest of his life.

Dad was a self-made man. That’s why he decided to go to Canada, where a young man could make a future for himself regardless of class or education. He worked on the Avro Arrow, possibly Canada’s greatest technological accomplishment. He served in management capacity in various corporations, and started his own. He could do anything and fix anything, a skill he did not pass on to me.

And he served me as an elder in our church. One night years ago, I was going through a time of enormous discouragement. We had lost one-third of our members, and I thought the years of our labour had been in vain. Was God really still with me? He came alongside me, put his hand on my shoulder for a while, then told this simple story. On an RAF airbase somewhere in the middle east about ten years before I was born, he was about to board a plane. As he was getting on the plane, he heard his name being called out by his commanding officer, telling him he was being taken off the mission and replaced by another man. The plane took off, but never came back. All aboard were killed. He didn't have to say anything else. God had a plan for my life before I was born.

I still miss that hand on my shoulder. I love you, Dad. We’ll meet again in the arms of Jesus.

Perseverance

I’ve just come back from a weekend with 30 young men eager to grow in God and extend his kingdom.

What do young men need to hear about? Well, at or near the top of the list is how to persevere. And that’s what I talked about.

One of Paul’s most powerful statements is this: “Forgetting what lies behind, I strain forward.” The last phrase in Greek is a double compound participle. Yikes! What is that? It means an ordinary word intensified, and then intensified again.

In the same passage, where he writes to the Philippians using the terminology of about the Olympic races, he has already talked about pressing on. That’s a running word: “keep running.”

Now he adds to it the picture of the runner at the very end of the race, with his body stretched out at a 45 degree angle, straining forward to get the greatest possible advantage in order to cross the finish line first.

Our culture is built around convenience, not perseverance. We want it, and we want it now. We want to make the minimum investment to gain the maximum benefit. That’s why you see people lining up at the lottery counter and the casino.

That’s why we produce charismatic preachers who explode at 30 but are finished at 40, often by some moral or character failure.

God has a different way of operating. He will take 40, 50 or 60 years of a person’s life just to prepare them for what he wants to do with the rest of it. When he’s refined the gold, he can make something beautiful and lasting out of it.

But how do we get there?

Yup, you got it. Perseverance.

We watch professional athletes, skilled musicians or gifted surgeons, and none of us has any doubt about the incredible amount of hard work it took to get them to where they are.

So why is it we think that we can accelerate the process when it comes to Christian character or leadership?

Don’t trust anyone who hasn’t submitted to training. It is good for a man (or woman) to bear the yoke when they are young. That is the Bible speaking, not me.

When I started running again 9 or 10 years ago, it took me a long time before I really began to make progress. Then one day I went out with a running club in the UK, and to my surprise I found myself near the beginning of the large pack.

When I started to learn Hebrew, for a long time it looked like nothing more than hen scratching. Then one day I began to find myself translating Biblical passages and even reading parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I’m sure there were many victims of my early years of preaching and counselling. I even counselled people (confidently!) on marriage issues when I was still single. But eventually God was able to use my skills and gifts to help people, though I am still amazed how he does it.

There may be shortcuts to the gym, but there are no shortcuts at the gym.

Likewise, there are no shortcuts to maturity.

It requires perseverance.

If there is such a thing as a guarantee of success in life, it’s perseverance. It will get you further than anything else I know.

And it’s just like a financial investment -- the earlier you start, the better.

Today would be a good time.

"Enjoy the journey!" - true or false?

I’ve done a fair bit of travelling lately. The most recent leg was an 18 hour trek from Newcastle in England via Amsterdam and Toronto to the small city of Owen Sound on the shores of Georgian Bay where we live.

How many times can you honestly say you enjoyed the journey? The best I can say is I was glad to have staggered across the finish line and collapsed into bed.

And yet people often tell us to enjoy the spiritual journey we are on, as opposed, for instance, to focussing on the destination we want to arrive at.

In all honesty, I don’t really get the advice to enjoy that journey any more than I would understand a suggestion I should revel in my 18 hour trek home from northern England.

The problem is that the Bible (and certainly its last book) presents us as people on a journey, on the way from spiritual Egypt, protected yet challenged in the wilderness and tribulation of this present life, en route to the Promised Land of the new Jerusalem.

While we are definitely on a journey, I’m not certain the Bible commands us to enjoy it. I definitely believe it tells us to endure it. But enjoy?

Maybe it would be better to look at it this way. We are to endure the journey, but what we are to enjoy is knowing Christ and the privilege of living for him and walking in the way of his cross.

Count it all joy, James says, when you encounter trials. Hmmm… well, that does sound a bit like enjoying the journey. But what actually gives me joy is the prospect of getting to the destination James sets out: that I may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

It’s not the trials that give us the joy. It’s not the journey that makes us content.

What keeps us in the journey is the fact that its trials are designed to make us dig deeper into God, and that is where we strike oil. I do not enjoy the trials, but I do enjoy the benefits of knowing the Lord more deeply. His presence invades my suffering, his interventions make the yoke easy, his song comes into my heart. And somehow the hassles and aggravations bother me less.

Let me pursue this from one more angle. Life is a mixture of journey and destination.

All along the journey, we are reaching destinations. For instance, Elaine and I are on a journey leaving the local pastorate to engage in international ministry to churches around the world. The journey, like most other things we have done over our lifetime, is a pioneering one. Some people and churches just don’t get it. There has been pain in the journey and lots of testing. But along the way, there have been massive encouragements -- destinations reached. Can I say I have enjoyed the journey? No, in fact most of the time I have found it very hard. But have I found the Lord over and over again in the midst of it? Yes I have, and for that I am thankful. And I know when we launch out next summer, we will have reached a significant destination along the journey, and will take great joy in it. More than that, God will be glorified in what he has done in us and for us.

Some folk are on a much harder journey than us. Read the two posts on this website a few weeks ago by our dear friend Jan Vickers, for one example.

The journey is tough. The destinations reached along the way give us strength. The ultimate goal is certain. God is faithful.

But most of all, find him along the way.

That’s where the joy is.

He's here

It is said of a well-known Christian lady that she would pray until she felt the Holy Spirit had come to her. And then everything was fine. She would simply say, “He’s here.”

Now I know that in truth the Holy Spirit, as God on earth, is in fact always here. He is never absent from the earth in which he represents both the Father and the Son who created it.

From that perspective, it seems a bit strange to invite the Holy Spirit into our services as if he is somehow waiting in the foyer trying to gain admission.

And yet…

I have found that in those many times where I find myself desperate, tired, stressed, anxious and fearful, there is one antidote. I go somewhere and cry out to the Holy Spirit until he comes to me.

This morning, I simply gave all the burdens I am carrying up to God, abandoning myself and all my situations to him. And as I cried out to God, he came.

When the Holy Spirit comes to you, or at least when you open the door of your heart and your spirit to him, it changes everything.

You receive strength and comfort and power. Your attitude changes from fear to faith, from desperation to satisfaction, from hopelessness to joy.

Today (as I write this) is a Sunday morning. I am speaking three times in two churches. I have people to meet and people to pray for. And there is one thing I know for certain: without him I am nothing. Yet with him I can do anything.

The power of the Holy Spirit takes us into the place where we can do whatever God has placed before us to do.

No matter what is in front of you today, with him you can do it. It may be to preach a sermon, it may be to teach in a classroom, it may be to build a house, it may be to look after your kids. It doesn’t really matter what it is, you need the Holy Spirit to do it.

Yes the Holy Spirit is here. But have you opened the door to him? He won’t break it down. You need to invite him in.

But when that happens, everything becomes possible.

Most of us spend far too much time trying to live out of our own strength. Why not try living out of his strength instead?

“Come, Holy Spirit” is an ancient prayer of God’s people. You can find it in medieval Latin as much as modern English.

That prayer is still valid today. Why don’t you try it and see what happens.