Short Stories

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Maggie was the mother of two children, lived in upstate New York, and struggled as a single mother for years. She gave her heart and life to Jesus Christ as a teenager, she was faithful to her church and to prayer and loved her Savior with all her heart. Maggie's life was a difficult one, even in her childhood home things were hard, but her faith was strong and she trusted her life to Jesus.

Maggie became a faithful intercessor. She prayed for others and had a very long list of needs to pray through every day. From time to time there were testimonies from those that she prayed for about how God had provided in miraculous ways. This was always the highlight of her day, she loved hearing about the faithfulness of God in answering prayer. Yet in her own struggles she never really seemed to get a breakthrough. And at night when the kids were asleep she would pour out her breaking heart to her Savior, "Lord, I need help to". After many years of this routine she began to be very discouraged about her own needs. She tried all the formulas, all the how-to teachings about how to get answers to prayer. She began to realize that she had a greater faith to believe that God would touch others then she even had for herself. She was trying to move God, she was trying to get God to help her the way that she had seen He had helped others. But try as she did she could not move the hand of God for her own life. It wasn't long before Maggie began to let her devotion to praying over her list of needs for others slip. Eventually her intercession stopped altogether, and her confusion about why God wasn't helping her became depressing. She had heard the preacher say that our needs do not move the heart of God, only faith does that. But she had tried and tried to have enough faith but nothing is changing. Like so many in her church, and like so many in many churches, she lived with her pain and confusion hidden where no one could see.

One day while Maggie was reading the Bible in her morning devotion, she was reading the story about how Moses had asked God to see His glory. She read that God had said to Moses that He would make all of His goodness pass before him. Then it hit her, that word seemed to jump off the page. That word was stirring such faith and such hope in her heart, she was beginning to feel alive again. Why had she not seen it before? Why had this word that she had read so many times before gone almost unnoticed? But what a beautiful word, what an awesome word, and what was that word – goodness. Maggie's mind was racing, she was seeing something she'd never seen before in Scriptures that were so familiar. Her mind is being renewed and with that was the renewed hope that her life would be transformed. Maggie almost began to dance and then shouted out to the top of her voice what she just realized. “It is not my faith that moves God it is His own goodness! I don't have to move God with my faith, God is moved by His own compassion, it is the goodness in His heart that moves Him”. Then she realized that her faith was the connection to the goodness of God, it was not the cause. God had just moved her.

Maggie's life once again is alive with new revelation, a revelation of the goodness of God for her. She had had that faith for others in the past but now she has it for herself as well. Her mind is being renewed and her life is being transformed, and the testimonies of the faithfulness of God to answer prayer are more numerous than they had ever been in the past. She has experienced the goodness of God for herself and it is her constant message to those who are in need. He is good, He is good, He is always good!

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