Many years ago I went overseas on a short-term mission trip with Campus Crusade for Christ. For two months I traveled around northwest Argentina, showing the Jesus Film and preaching the gospel. At the end of the project all the teams came together and took a train to the capitol, Buenos Aires, to debrief before flying home. At the train station I somehow got separated from the others and left behind. Not a problem, I thought. I had the address of the place we were supposed to go, so I figured I’d just take a cab.
It turned out there was a problem. Two problems, actually. The first problem was that I had the mailing address, not the street address. The second was that my cab driver was a crook. I ended up on a busy sidewalk, somewhere in downtown Buenos Aires, without the slightest idea of how to find the office I needed to find. So I did the only thing I could think of: I prayed, and then I sat down on the curb and opened my Bible. It was only a few minutes later that an Argentinian woman stopped and asked me if everything was okay. In my broken Spanish I explained what had happened. It turned out that she knew the building I was trying to find. It was only a few blocks away.
In 1 Kings 17 we read the story of a widow who met the prophet Elijah during a severe drought. When he asked her for food, she replied that she only had a handful of flour and a little oil; just enough to make one last meal for herself and her son.
Elijah said to her, “Don’t be afraid. Go home and do as you have said. But first make a small loaf of bread for me from what you have and bring it to me, and then make something for yourself and your son. For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land.’”
She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family. For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the Lord spoken by Elijah (1 Kings 17:13-16).
So often we anticipate trouble and start to worry. The economy looks like it’s getting worse; will my savings hold out? If I get sick and can’t work, how will I pay my bills? What’s that noise my car is making? We panic if we can’t see a solution. But in both the examples I just gave, help didn’t come when the first hint of a problem showed up, but only when every other resource had run out. When I had no idea which direction to go, when the widow was asked to give a stranger the food that she and her son needed to live, when there was nothing left, that was when God showed up.
One secret I’ve learned over the years is to take this promise from Scripture…
And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19).
…and look at it from the other end: if this promise is true, and I believe that it is, then anything that God doesn’t provide, I don’t need. God does a lot of last minute rescues, but peace does not come from expecting God to rescue me. Peace comes when I’m okay with whatever he chooses to do. It comes when I reach the end of my abilities and my resources, and I realize that it’s more important to do what he wants than to get what I want. And there, at the end of all I can do, is also when miracles happen.