Friday: At the End of My Rope
WEEK 38
FRIDAY
AT THE END OF MY ROPE
Acts 8:35-40
This impulse to share Christ is endemic in those who know him. “Mary” got into a train at a late hour to go home after speaking in Chicago. The coach was full, so she went into the diner. The men were sitting around drinking. Seeing that “Mary” was “different,” one of the men asked her where she had been and what she was doing. She replied, “Speaking.” “On what?” “On religion.” With that they all covered their glasses with their newspapers. “Oh no,” said “Mary,” “this has nothing to do with that.” That let down the tension, and they said, “Go on and tell us about it.” Soon everybody in the dining car was crowding around her. “How did you get this?” one asked. “At the foot of the cross,” she replied. “Well, how did you get at the foot of the cross?” And she replied: “At the end of my rope.” “Hurry up,” one of them said. “You only have three quarters of an hour to finish this before we get to our station.” For two hours not a drink was ordered, and they listened breathlessly as a simple country girl full of the love of Christ told how it can and does happen. “The best two hours of my life,” said a soldier boy back from Korea. They had seen the real thing incarnated.
Mary got hold of a leading manufacturer and his wife. Let him tell his story:
I haven’t been very good to God. Many times I have hurt him and his cause. For a long time he has been knocking at my door, but for some reason I could not or would not open it all the way, occasionally a small crack but nothing more. And then came Mary, and she didn’t waste much time. She asked, “Bill, have you really surrendered to God, surrendered everything?” I had to tell her I had not. I had a secondhand religion. God has never been very real to me. Perhaps the reason is found in a book I picked up giving a recipe for being miserable: “Think about yourself; talk about yourself; use ‘I’ as often as possible; mirror yourself continually in the opinion of others; listen readily to what people say about you; expect to be appreciated.” As I read that, I knew it fitted me. So God wasn’t real.
O God, my Lord, help me to take down all the barriers to reality in my life. Help me to let you have me, really have me, all the way, all the time. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: This sharing of Christ will be an expression not of duty but of love; I love to talk about him.