All Things New

by Lynn Austin

She looked fragile and faded, like a flower that has been dried and pressed flat between the pages of a heavy book.

“War changes people,”

“Saul says he’s a white man. You trust white men?” “I don’t exactly trust them . . . but I do trust Jesus.”

“Remember all the guests we used to entertain at our dinner table? Your father knew such interesting people. They used to rave on and on about our smoked hams.” Josephine wanted to beg her to stop. God had told the survivors of Sodom and Gomorrah not to look back after they’d been rescued from death and destruction, and if Jo’s family continued to gaze into the past, they were going to become stuck in place like pillars of salt, too. In order to get them to move forward with her, Josephine feared she would have to chip away at their rock-hard stubbornness one bucketful at a time and haul them toward a new future against their will.

“I don’t know how to help him. How do I get him to move forward?” “He never will as long as he remains bitter. Bitterness is one of the deadliest emotions we ever feel. You can’t look forward when you’re bitter, only backward—thinking about what you’ve lost, stuck in the past, despairing because it’s gone. In the end, it devours all hope.”

Everywhere I went, the Lord kept speaking the same words to me: ‘Love your enemies, love your enemies.’ I didn’t know what it meant at first. I knew love couldn’t be a feeling in this case; it had to be an action.

“I assure you that I do not intend to kill myself.” “Maybe not in the same way that he tried to do it. But despair will have the same result, Josephine, if you let it run its course. You might still be walking around like the rest of us, eating and conversing, but you’ll be dead inside.”

“I may not know much about you, it’s true. But I do know we were all created to love and serve God. He loves us deeply and passionately. And so any time one of His children decides to walk away from Him, it can only lead to despair. And spiritual death.”

“If God never answered any of my previous prayers, what makes you think He would answer me this time?” “Because now you would be asking the right questions. And while I’ve never heard an audible voice, God does speak to me through the words of Scripture—which is why I suggest that you read the story of Job. And He sometimes chooses to speak through your friends . . . and I beg you to consider me your friend. When we cut ourselves off from God and from other people, it always leads to despair.

“Prayer isn’t just about asking for things. It’s taking time to hear what God is saying, too, just like any good conversation. Once we finally stop talking and demanding and begging for things, it’s easier to hear what God is trying to say to us.

I’m saying there are reasons why God doesn’t answer our prayers the way we’d like Him to. Remember Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane? He didn’t want to suffer any more than we want to. But He said, ‘Nevertheless not what I will but what thou wilt.’ And it was God’s will that Jesus would die. God didn’t even answer His own Son’s prayer! But Jesus trusted that God’s will was better than His own.”

“Sometimes it’s His way of coaxing us to come back to Him. God used the war to draw me back to Him. People do more praying on the battlefield than they ever do in churches.”

We’re wrong to expect our lives to be perfect on this side of heaven. And it’s wrong for parents to shelter their children and make them believe that the most important thing is to be happy.”

“When we walk away from God, we walk away from any chance of joy. Joy doesn’t come from circumstances but from God.”

She was going to take all of those seeds they kept throwing at her and hand them over to Jesus so they could grow into joy.

But if we serve God and honor Him, He has promised to meet all our needs. That is the very definition of faith—to walk in hope, trusting in what you can’t see or control.