Are you going through a time of discouragement?

A week ago today I arrived in Jos for the Introduction to Discourse Principles workshop I am to help facilitate. I arrived full of fears that I had been out of this business for too long to be of any use. Then on Sunday I picked up a copy of Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest in the guesthouse where I am staying, and read the entry for Monday, October 13, the first day of the workshop. It was entitled, “Individual Discouragement and Personal Enlargement,” and used the life of Moses to illustrate how the calling of God often works:

Moses saw the oppression of his people and felt certain that he was the one to deliver them, and he started to right their wrongs, only to find himself in the desert for forty years feeding sheep. When God appeared and told him to go and bring forth the people, He said, “Who am I, that I should go?”

I went on to read, in tears by now:

“We may have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants, and we start to do the thing, then comes something equivalent to the forty years in the wilderness, as if God had ignored the whole thing, and when we are thoroughly discouraged God comes back and revives the call, and we get the quaver in and say, ‘Oh, who am I?’ We have to learn the first great stride of God–I AM THAT I AM hath sent thee.”

Ten years ago God called me clearly to help mother tongue translators of the Bible discover the discourse grammar of their languages. Back then I was certain I could do it. This year the call came again, and I was not at all sure I could. But I AM THAT I AM has been with all of us this week in our weaknesses, fears and brokenness, and the results have already been extraordinary.

If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a big personal enlargement ahead.

Love,
Barb