Christian Living
Larry Lilly's Letter Friday February 24, 2006
Have you felt that if people would quit hindering you either on purpose or out of ignorance you would be a great success? Don't fret too much about this trait of failures, for our father Adam started this defeatist practice. Many preachers with whom I am acquainted would have built much larger and more influential churches/ministries if only the little woman understood them.
A truly great humanitarian looked at it a little differently:
"Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it."
It is an observable fact that many theologians who hold to a much better Christology than Albert Schweitzer would do well to emulate his practice of service without expectation of reward.
If folks who state they want to do something would quit waiting on some person or some miracle to remove all the obstacles and get started on the whatever it is they think the Lord has given them to accomplish, the world would change in a few short weeks.
I read years ago that obstacles are placed by God along the path He leads to teach us to trust Him and to persist along said path.
I have studied the life and ministry of Dr. Schweitzer and I shamefacedly admit that I wish I had his tenacity in the face of seeming insurmountable obstacles. The man had no idea of how to give up. Over the course of a lifetime he touched the entire world from an obscure African village helping the most helpless people on the face of the earth and he did it for many years before anyone noticed what was going on. He founded Lambarene, the name of his hospital compound in French Equatorial Africa, and in 1917 he and his wife were sent to a French internment camp as prisoners of war. After the war he was at it again, I suppose thinking a song from my own childhood, "We don't stop for nobody."
He founded the leprosarium at Lambarene with the money from the Noble Prize.
This renowned man refused to give up in spite of the stones others were constantly throwing at him and pushing into his path. He kept at it and never gave into the failure inducing thinking, "If only."
Certainly he had failures along the way. Certainly he was attacked by others who would do it differently, but he kept at it, night and day consumed with helping the poorest and most sickly in the poverty stricken part of what was still called the Dark Continent.
If you find stones along the path, don't worry about who put them there, don't wish for someone to move them for you, just trust Christ, move the stones or go around them and keep doing what you know in your heart God wants you to be about.
Larry Lilly Copyright 2006 Use with credit.
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