Unstoppable (26 page)

Patience is part of the surrender process—and so is trust. You and I tend to want answers now, but we have to trust that God has His own timetable.
If we stay in faith and seek understanding, His plan will be revealed when we are ready for the answer. The purpose of a child born without arms or legs was a mystery revealed slowly as I grew in faith. As I’ve noted before, one of the keys for me was reading in John 9:3 about the man born blind. Jesus performs a miracle to heal him and explains that His purpose for this man was to use him to display God’s glory. This scripture helped me realize that God might also have a purpose for me. Maybe, like the man born without sight, I’d been created without arms and legs so that God could deliver a message or somehow work through me.

As my understanding of God’s ways and life’s opportunities increased, He patiently put me on His path and opened my eyes to my purpose. Jessica said she has had a similar experience in dealing with her challenges from cancer and the treatments.

“I know for me there were times when I felt I could not go on,” she said. “My voice is the one thing I have had a very hard time dealing with. I am hard to understand, and even though I may repeat myself several times, people may still not know what I am saying. It makes me feel very stupid and at times worthless.

“There have been days when I did not feel like opening my mouth, and I was angry that the Lord allowed my voice to be affected because it is something I have to use every day,” she added. “The Lord showed me, however, that my voice is the very thing that gives me a platform to speak for Him. Because it is harder to understand me, people really have to take the time to listen. It also makes people realize that what I went through was real. It has given me several opportunities to witness and speak of what the Lord has done and is doing in my life.”

I believe that when you surrender your life in full, with complete trust and patience, there is another great reward that comes your way: God’s
strength. Since the age of eighteen, I have traveled the world, often visiting twenty or more countries each year. I’m not flying in private jets. The places I travel to are often dangerous, difficult to reach, and unhealthy due to disease, impure water, and lack of modern medical care. Yet somehow God keeps me healthy and gives me the strength to carry His message to millions of people.

Jessica and I have both come to understand that surrender brings strength. “The times when I am the most weary are usually the times when Christ asks me to get up and serve the most. In helping others and seeing hopeless hearts find the peace of God, my own heart is then uplifted and I realize once again that the joy of the Lord is my strength,” she said.

“So my suggestion to someone with tremendous challenges is to live life with a heart that is surrendered. Always remember that even though things may be hard here, Christ calls these our ‘light and momentary troubles.’ He says that they are bringing us an ‘eternal weight of glory.’ Look outside of yourself and reach out to souls that need the Lord and His love. In doing that, the Lord will fulfill your needs and make you see that He loves you beyond measure,” Jessica said.

This young woman of God is incredible, isn’t she? She told me that the Lord may come at any time, but she wants to be found faithful when He does. “I pray that I will be filled up knowing that my worth comes from Him,” Jessica told me.

You and I may like to think that we are in command of our lives, our comings and our goings, but once we commit our lives to Him, God is in command every minute of every day. Our gracious heavenly Father often overrides my carefully made plans by revealing His own deep, unfathomable ways, and I am humbled every time. I marvel at the beauty and pure brilliance of God’s divine plan each time. Sometimes I think back to what
it must have been like to have been a disciple and an apostle and a witness to God at work through Jesus on earth, moving in indescribable ways. I can almost picture His followers returning to their own congregants scattered throughout the Roman Empire and reporting back to the believers saying, “You’ll never believe what God did!”

The power of Jesus is here. When you put your faith in action by surrendering all to Him, you won’t believe what God will do for you. I promise you will discover an exciting life when you put yourself in His hands. Look forward, then, to a life in faith, believing that Christ intends to use us as we intentionally surrender to His hope-filled, meaningful purposes for us. Allow His cleansing love to flow freely and at full force through your life. As the psalm tells us, “Taste and see that the L
ORD
is good.”

NINE

O
N MY FIRST VISIT TO
L
IBERIA A FEW YEARS AGO
,
MY GOAL WAS TO INSPIRE
as many people as possible with a message of hope and faith. Given the country’s reputation, I had no idea that this embattled African country and its long-suffering people would inspire me as well.

This small coastal nation founded by freed American slaves had long been known as one of the poorest, most violent, and most corrupt countries in the world. Although it was once among Africa’s most educated and industrious nations and rich with natural resources, Liberia suffered greatly for more than thirty years due to political upheaval. Most damaging were two civil wars lasting until 2003. More than two hundred thousand Liberians were killed during that war. Millions more fled to other countries. Sex slavery and drug trafficking ran rampant.

The deep scars of violence and corruption were still very much in
evidence when we arrived in 2008. Most of the roads were barely drivable. Electricity was rare outside urban areas, and even there it was sketchy. Only a quarter of Liberians have access to clean drinking water. Dead animal carcasses fouled the air and sickened our stomachs. Many people along our travel route appeared malnourished and destitute. Time after time, we saw men, women, and children rooting through trash bins and piles of garbage.

So you are probably wondering, where did I find inspiration in this bleak landscape?

Everywhere we went!

You see, the poverty and neglect we encountered are remnants of Liberia’s haunted past—a dark period dominated by decadent dictators and bloodthirsty warlords. During our visit we also saw Liberia’s future, which holds much hope.

For three decades few aid organizations, missionaries, or charitable groups dared to enter Liberia because of the hostile environment. But since 2005 that has changed dramatically. Billions of dollars are now pouring into Liberia, with the United States alone contributing more than $230 million a year to the rebuilding effort.

Our lodging host during my 2008 visit was one of the many charitable groups that have joined the international effort to help Liberia recover and rebuild. We stayed aboard the
Africa Mercy
, which is part of the Mercy Ships ministry. The ship itself is a former rail ferry that is now a love boat of another sort: a five-hundred-foot floating hospital operated by a Christian charity and staffed by a caring crew of more than four hundred volunteer surgeons, nurses, doctors, dentists, ophthalmologists, physical therapists, and other health-care professionals hailing from forty nations.

All those medical teams serving on the
Africa Mercy
donate their time and services, and most pay their own way to join its missions around the world. Liberia lost 95 percent of its medical centers during its civil war. While I was there, the state-of-the-art facilities onboard this amazing ship were some of the most modern in the world. On some days thousands lined up to come aboard and find help.

Africa Mercy
is the largest hospital vessel in the fleet of this global charity. The Mercy Ships mission is to follow the two-thousand-year-old model of Jesus, bringing hope and healing to the world’s forgotten poor by loving and serving others. In my talk to the four hundred volunteers aboard this incredible ship, I expressed my admiration for the great gift of their talents and skills to serve some of God’s most needy people. The ship’s volunteers give at least two weeks of their time, but some serve for many years. They actually pay for their room and board on the ship. That’s amazing considering that these medical professionals are donating their only free time from their high-stress jobs back home.

I toured the ship and visited some of its six operating rooms, where patients were being treated for gangrene, cataracts, cleft lips, burns, tumors, broken limbs, childbirth trauma, and many other problems. Later, I learned that during the
Africa Mercy
’s stay in Liberia over the course of four years, the volunteer medical crew performed more than 71,800 specialized surgeries and 37,700 dental procedures.

The free medical care provided to the thousands of patients by the volunteers onboard the
Africa Mercy
is a wonderful example of sowing good seeds by putting faith into action in service to others. When I returned home, I raved about the volunteers so much to my sister, Michelle, who like our mum is a nurse, that she signed on for a tour with them!

Like me, my sister believes that we should all plant good seeds to grow
strong trees that bear fruit for many years, creating more good seeds and more fruit-bearing trees in the process. Michelle and I may never see any of the fruit created by what we do during our time on this earth, but that’s okay. Our job is to plant as many good seeds as we can, knowing that God will determine what grows and what doesn’t grow. I encourage you to sow as many seeds of love, encouragement, inspiration, and kindness as you can.

The important thing with both love and faith is to act on them. Put them out there, where they can contribute to the greater good. It’s a choice you can make every morning. Decide that you are going to use your God-given talents and abilities to serve a larger purpose. Each of us has talents of some sort, and we all have influence with friends and family and business networks that allow us to magnify our gifts by involving others so that they plant their seeds too.

We are here to follow the example of Jesus. The Son of God gave us His all, and we should give to God all that we have by serving His children with our love, just as we love Him. That’s what Jesus did. He loved and served all of us even though He was the King, the Son of God. The great thing about planting good seeds is that God nurtures them as He sees fit, so sometimes the most humble seed can grow into something as large as a 16,572-ton floating hospital that has a positive impact on thousands and thousands of lives.

The Mercy Ships were envisioned and created by a Christian couple who acted upon their faith to sow good seeds and have served others in incredible ways. Living in Switzerland when they founded Mercy Ships, Don and Deyon Stephens have been recognized around the world for their humanitarian work, which provides the best in modern medical care to the poorest people of the developing world. Don holds a theology degree, and
Deyon is a registered nurse. They were inspired to refit their first mercy ship in 1978 after their son John Paul was born with severe learning disabilities. Later, Don was on a trip to India and met Mother Teresa, who encouraged the couple to join her in serving the world’s neediest people. “John Paul will help you to become the eyes and ears and limbs for many others,” she told them.

The Stephens were not wealthy, but they were so inspired by Mother Teresa’s encouragement that they convinced a Swiss bank to loan them a million dollars to buy their first ship, a retired Italian cruise liner. Since then their charity has found support from donors around the world, including Starbucks, which put one of its shops aboard the ship to supply free coffee so the medical teams would have plenty of caffeine to keep their energy up. (Remember, what we can’t do, God—and caffeine can!)

So there you have it, the first major source of inspiration I found in Liberia: a huge Danish ferry transformed into a ship of mercy by hundreds of wonderful volunteers, and a Christian couple who were inspired to serve others by the world’s greatest example of servant leadership at that time, Mother Teresa. Through her selfless work among the poor in Calcutta and the missions she established in 123 countries, this humble woman inspired millions of people like the Stephens to sow their good seeds around the world.

You may ask, “What can I do?” or “What do I have to give?” The answer is, “Yourself.” You and your God-given talents are the greatest gifts you can give. When you put faith into action to sow good seeds by serving others, you tap into a power beyond anything you can imagine. Just look at the lives saved and transformed by the Stephens and their mercy ships, or Mother Teresa and the more than six hundred missions she established around the world.

The second major source of inspiration I found in Liberia was a woman like Mother Teresa, a servant leader and Christian of incredible influence. You may be surprised to learn that she was a politician in a country infamous for corrupt leaders. I was wary at first, but like other people around the world, I quickly discovered that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was not at all like those tyrants and warlords who preceded her in Liberia.