Saturday: AVacancy into aVocation
WEEK 21
SATURDAY
A VACANCY INTO A VOCATION
1 Peter 2:19-23
We are considering the mastery of calamity and pain and making it contribute to the purposes for which we live.
The Meaning of Prayer is considered the best thing Harry Emerson Fosdick has written. But it came after a breakdown in the early days of his ministry. The breakdown threw him back on prayer; and out of that prayer experience a prayer expression—the book—was born.
A pastor’s wife said to me as we were driving to an airport, “I’ve found a new vocation. I’ve learned I can write.” She had never written a thing for publication until, on the verge of a breakdown, she was put in a hospital. While compelled to be quiet she began to write children’s stories for her own amusement. She soon found that a publisher was eager to publish them. They have gone into school systems, over the radio, and on television. She, who was denied children of her own, has brightened and enlightened the lives of thousands of children by taking what she did have—an illness and a cat—and making something out of them. That cat became the mouthpiece of her insights, and that illness opened possibilities she had not dreamed were there. She used what came to her and transformed what could have been a vacancy into a vocation.
A girl failed in her music examination and was refused admission into a music school. It awakened and stimulated her into endeavor with the result that she became so proficient she stood out as the top student in the whole of the state. That failure could have sent her into a tailspin of inferiority and perhaps self-pity. On the contrary, she headed into the wind of this failure and rose to the very top. She made her failure make her. Everything furthers those who know how to use everything. Even our falls can further us. I let my coat fall in a dark room; and when I picked it up, I found that the fall had turned on my pocket flashlight. The light let me see where the coat was! There is nothing that cannot be turned into something better if you know how to use it.
O Lord, I am safe, for I can use everything. I can master calamities because calamities open doors for me. Everything is opportunity when I am in you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I shall turn everything into a testimony this day—good, bad, indifferent.