You Leave Her To Me

You Leave Her To Me

by Virginia Law

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I don’t know about you, but I have never been a place that I was so convinced that the Lord wanted me there as here tonight. Friday morning I received a phone call from Delta Air Lines about 6:30 saying that the flight to Chicago was questionable. It was certainly to be delayed until at least 11:30, hoping that the airport would open up. And then I proceeded to get ready to leave for the airport in Lexington to fly to Cincinnati when they called me back and said the airport was closed for the day and that there was no flight from Lexington, from Cincinnati to Chicago and would not be for that day. I went back upstairs and I began to seek for guidance what I should do. And as I began to pray, I felt that certainly the wisest thing to do would be to go on to Cincinnati because if there was any chance of getting out of anywhere, it would be Cincinnati. And if not, then I would be canceled out and I would come back home late that afternoon on an afternoon flight. And I started down the stairs and I think divine guidance said to me, “You better get a pair of flat shoes and your needlepoint. You’ll be glad to have them both.”

So I went back upstairs and got out my needlepoint, got me a pair of flat pumps, flat shoes, and put my pumps in the suitcase. I wasn’t going dressed up this time. Flew to Cincinnati and I found out that I was only about one of two million people that were important and needed to get somewhere. The airport was absolutely chock-a-block. And I went to every agent in the whole Delta line with my story and he said, “There’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t get into Chicago and you can’t get to Chicago. This is your flight to Rochester.” And I decided it would have been a long time since breakfast and so I went down and ate to eat a bite of lunch and I sat down at the counter. As I sat there and had already ordered my lunch, I thought, you know, it seems to me the only people that are getting someplace are people who know where they want to go. If you can walk up to an agent and say, “Okay, change me from here to here,” they seem to get it. But if you go up to the agent and say, “Where can I do? What can I do?” he’ll say nothing. So I sat there and I said, “Now, Lord, the first thing is I really would just as soon go home.

I’ve no desire to launch out on this deal. There’s a real desire and many attractive things back in Wilmore for this weekend and just being with my family would be one of them. So this is not something that I want to do. But I release it in Your hands. Now, if You want me to go to Minnesota, You’ll have to let me know even where to go because I don’t know where to go. Where could I fly that would get me on the other side of this front so I could have a chance to get into Minnesota?” And the thought came to me, just as clear as anything, “Fly to St. Louis.” So I said to the waitress, “Just hold my salad, I’ll be back.” And I dashed out to the TWA counter and said to them, “I’d like a standby ticket for St. Louis this afternoon on your 310 flight.” He said, “Do you have a ticket to St. Louis?” And I said, “No, but I’m going to get one. Give me the standby ticket and I’ll go over and get Delta to change my ticket.” Well, he kind of frowned, but he handed me the ticket and wrote 1145 on my standby ticket, which is very important. And I got my call out to Wilbur Sales and said to him, “Now I can get into St. Louis, maybe.

I’m not sure I can. But there’s no chance, probably, of a reservation out of St. Louis. Now, which do you prefer me to do? I’d rather go home. Do you want me to come on to St. Louis and stand a chance of it being a futile trip and a hotel bill besides, or would you rather I take my suitcase and go back to Wilbur?” He said, “You come on to St. Louis. We’ll get you out of St. Louis.” When the 310 flight came in about 5 o’clock that afternoon, and I went out to get in line, they started handing back airplane tickets. And they gave back 30 standby tickets. And Virginia Law was the last person on the 310 flight on standby. If I had eaten my salad, I would have been too late. I flew into St. Louis, called Wilbur Sales, and Watkins Products Company sent their private Cessna 310 to St. Louis, and I flew up first class.

And when I got there, I think you can agree with me, I felt like the Lord had brought me to that point. And I have never spoken in my life with a greater sense of, I am here because God wanted me here than I did last night, and had a tremendous service with the Methodist convocation of Methodist men. And so this morning when we got up and saw the snow, and someone said, “Are you going on to Minneapolis?” I said, “Well, I tell you, if the Lord got me this far, I believe He’ll see me on.” And I come to you tonight with a real sense of God’s purpose in my life. And I think it’s always delightful when we can look and see God led us to this point. Now, I must confess to you, I wish I had this every day, but I don’t. There are a lot of days when I don’t know whether the Lord’s jerking me or I’m jerking Him, trying to go in another direction. But it is wonderful to have had an experience that just seemed to so unbelievably work out in my pattern, and certainly the kindness of Watkins Company and the graciousness of the pilot who flew me up all by myself from St. Louis was part of it.

I should like to read for you tonight several verses of Scripture. From the 28th chapter of Matthew, the 18th verse, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” And then over in John, the 15th chapter and the 12th verse, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.” And in the 13th verse, the 13th chapter, the 34th verse, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another even as I have loved you. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.”

I was speaking last week down in Florida, and one of the… I had given my one intelligent talk, which has all of the information as to why Congo is in chaos. I prepared it very carefully, and it has a lot of important data in it for the Florida chain of missions. And I had given it at a forum luncheon and was feeling quite intelligent and expecting some very intelligent questions to come back from the forum group, when one very old man, who was far too old to be interested in such subjects, stood up and said, “Ms. Law, I want you to tell us how you’ve got a husband.”

And so I had to tell him about how I had gone away to college, had arrived there and had seen the tall senior, and had learned in the dormitory that I wasn’t the first girl that had seen him, that there had been several, in fact, that had been watching him for about three years. And I don’t have to tell you that I was not one of those cute little freshmen. My problem was, how was I going to get an attention of a tall senior that wouldn’t pay any attention to the other girls? When I went back in the dining hall one day to get a tray of butterscotch pudding, and I came out with 20 dishes carefully placed on this huge tray, rushing out to wait the tables, and I suddenly had the sensation that something was wrong under one of my feet. And I realized that I had stepped right on top of a dish of butterscotch pudding that someone else had dropped upside down. And as I weaved around on this pudding, I lifted the tray up to save it. And as I gracefully went to the floor, I dumped the tray of pudding, not at my feet, but on my head. And the 20 dishes began to bounce off and wipe themselves down over my face.

Well, I always did like butterscotch pudding, and I didn’t like it any less at that time. So I began to lick it off as it came down. I looked up, and I had been noticed. The tall senior had seen me. And he turned to one of his good friends and said, “She would make some missionary a good wife.” And I’ve always lamented the fact that I didn’t know he was looking for one or would have jumped right up and volunteered and saved us both months of agony.

As I began to date the tall senior, I soon learned that he had a tremendous sense of dedication and call to the mission field. And I began to face one of the greatest dilemmas in my life. How do you know that God is calling you? How do you recognize the voice of God? Burley’s sense of missionary call had come at one climactic moment as he sat listening to Dr. Ellick Reed preach. And I had been converted at 14 years of age, had been interested in Christian vocations all during my high school days. But as to having come to the point in my life where I could say, “This is what God wants me to do,” I never had arrived at that point. And I began to decide that the best way to solve my dilemma was to get the Lord to call me. And so I began to pray for Him to call me. Of course, I wanted Him to call me to Congo, where Burley was going. But this I didn’t feel the Lord would have any objections to if He was going to call. This went on for actually months, causing a great dilemma and spiritual battle in my own heart. Until there came to the campus a missionary speaker. I went over to talk to him about my problem and very honestly opened my heart and told him exactly how I felt.

And he said to me, “Virginia, God has two ways of getting us where He wants us. Some people He comes to in a very sudden revelation. This is what I want you to do. But a great many people, God comes to us in open doors. He opens a door and an opportunity. You go through this and this leads to another one. And you really don’t realize the pattern nor the direction of your life until you begin to look back on and see how it has worked together. This is the way God has of leading. Either way is just as much the guidance, the call of God. But God calls in very small degrees to some people and very great visions to other people. You go on to Congo with Burley and tell him that he’s lucky to have someone that’s so in love with him and so eager for him to do God’s will.” And I did tell Burley that. In fact, for 22 years, I frequently found an occasion to remind him how lucky he was to have me.

When I left the council room that afternoon, I went up and knelt down in a prayer chapel there at Asbury and utterly dedicated myself to serve God as a missionary to Congo. And I took very real and very genuinely the commission of go ye into all the world. And as I began to seek to realize what is this commission? What does it involve? If I’m going out to witness to Christ, what does this mean? Teaching them to observe all things which I have commanded you. And then Christ said, “A new commandment I give to you that you love one another.” And increasingly through the years, there has come to my heart the realization that this is the commandment. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.” Here is the standard by which we are judged. Here is the commission, which is to every person, irregardless of where he is. This is the witness that we give. Tonight I’d like to share with you some thoughts that I have. I’m not a preacher, as you well know. I’m simply a witness for Christ and for what I feel He has revealed to me in my own heart. The first thing that I came was, Christ said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

That there has to come to be a time when I accepted myself. Now when I was growing up as a child, I had two great, serious personality problems. One of them was that I simply couldn’t keep quiet. And I was constantly being told to sit down and shut up by adults, which was a good admonition. But the biggest problem was that I had an intense interest in people and an eternal desire to relate to people, to visit with people, to know people. And so my nosy neighbors found out everything they wanted to know from the Williams family for me. Because all they had to do was ask me. I’d tell them the whole story. This eternal desire to relate to this person caused the gray hairs in my poor mother’s head. Because she never knew what Virginia was going to tell. I didn’t have the judgment to control what I was going to tell. This was the first problem. The second problem was that I had such an intense, keen sense of observation that I recognize now for being that. But then I didn’t know what it was. And I would see something. And I would come home and I would tell mother and dad I saw something. And they would hardly believe it. Or else I would say to an adult something that I had seen with my eyes and they would say, “Oh, she just made that up.”

And this frequently happened to me as a child. Until many times I would think in my mind, “Well, is it possible for me to see something so clearly and it not be the truth?” When I wrote Appointment Congo, the world suddenly woke up and realized that I saw things, that this was actually a gift that God had given me. That I observe and I see the most minute details. When I walked into your parsonage this afternoon and she said she had painted the parsonage and I said, “Oh, I see you’ve changed it from the color of the drake, please.” She looked at me shocked. I was in her home one time. But I carried away with me a perfect picture of the home that I was in. Because I just observe everything as I go around as a point of nature. Now, why I share this with you tonight is that I came to realize that those things which were actually causing me the greatest difficulty with other individuals was that thing which was uniquely me. This was the thing that made me different from you. This was the personality that God had given me. And I had to come… Well, of course, I’ve had to learn not to tell everything I know. But so does a singer have to learn to control their voice.

And so does an artist have to learn not to splatter paint. We have to come to the place where we see ourselves and accept ourselves as we are and realize that we are different because God created each one of us different. I’m sure that in many, many people that I come to face in trying to help them in spiritual growth, self-rejection is one of their biggest problems. They feel God loves everybody else but them. They can’t come to realize that God created them and that He loves them and that He wants them as they are. I can distinctly remember as a parent, we had two boys, David and Paul. And how many times we said to Paul, “We don’t want another David. We want a Paul and a David.” And the delight that I had as a parent when one day David said to Paul, “Let’s go play tennis.” And Paul said, “I don’t want to. I’m going to play golf.” Well, praise the Lord. He’s going to go do what he wants to do because he suddenly realized he doesn’t have to do what David does. Now at our house, he constantly tells David where to go.

We have to come to a sense of self-acceptance of ourselves. We were going to the mission field. We went to Hartford, Connecticut to study at the Kennedy School of Missions and we were there studying all kinds of important subjects but the most important as far as my family was concerned was how to keep healthy in hot climates. Because we were forming a medical kit that I was going to take to Congo and we sewed up beefsteak on the kitchen table with a crooked needle and we stuck syringe, gave shots to oranges and all kinds of things and then we put them in this medical kit and packed it away carefully because this was to be used in Congo. We went to Florida with the two little boys. David was in five and Paul was three. Burley was called to Philadelphia to study the hospital plans and we stayed in the nice sunny south for a couple of extra weeks. And then the time came and I got on the train in Jacksonville with the Pullman berth with these two little boys going north. The train was full of elderly passengers that were returning from Florida having spent the winter there. And so I put these two little boys, dressed them and put them up in the top bunk for bed.

It was the old kind, old-fashioned Pullman where you could lie up and look out through the curtains. The Pullmans were along the side, not the compartments like we have now in modern days. And I went back to get dressed in the ladies’ lounge with my new dressing gown that I’d gotten just for this kind of occasion. And I was there when I heard some little lady, kind lady, say, “Where are you little boys going?” And the little boy said, “We’re going to Africa.” “They’re going to Africa?” “Yes.” “What are you going to Africa for?” “Because my mom is a doctor and she’s going out to Africa to take care of sick folks.” And then another little boy says, “Yeah, she’s got a needle in it and she’ll stick you if you’re sick.”

And said, “Really? And where’s your father?” “He’s in Philadelphia.” “Isn’t he going to Africa too?” “Yeah. He’s going to build my mom a hospital. He’s in Philadelphia studying hospital plans.” And there I stood half-dressed in the room and not knowing what to do, whether to rush out and correct the mistake or whether to stay back until I was finished. And I stayed just about five seconds too long because one of the ladies said, “You know, I knew she was a doctor. She looked like one.” And somebody else said, “Oh yes, you know, so intelligent looking. She walks like a doctor. Isn’t it amazing how you can tell a professional person when you see one?” And in those five seconds, I became a doctor. I came walking out not knowing really what to do, but deciding, well, rather than trying to straighten it all up, I just leave it be. And so with great respect, one of the ladies said to me, “I hear you’re going to Congo.” She said, “Yes. Are there many doctors in your area?” “No.” “Oh, your husband, I believe, is going to build a hospital.” “Yes.” “Oh, I know they’ll be so happy to have you come.” “Well, yes.” And I crawled in bed. And I lay down, rather enjoying this prestige, when suddenly it dawned on me that that whole train was full of asthmatic souls.

And I could just imagine somebody yelling, “Is there a doctor on the train?” I didn’t sleep much that night. I prayed for the passengers far more than the Lord had admonished us to, for their well-being. And the next morning, I never was so happy in my life as I was to get off that train. But I learned that night that there is something defeating about a being what you’re not.

Putting on a mask, trying to pretend. There’s an uneasiness. There’s an inability to express concern for other people when we’re going around pretending that we’re something that we’re not. And I came off the mission field. They made us take psychological exams, and Burley and I took ours. And then we went for evaluation. I hastened to say this was not for therapy, simply for evaluation of exams. And the psychiatrist said to me, “You don’t like to teach school, do you?” “Oh,” I said, “I’ve been teaching school all this terms.” He said, “But you don’t really like it, do you?” I said, “I’m a good teacher.” He said, “That wasn’t a question. You don’t like to teach school, do you?” And I said, “No, I really don’t.” And he said, “You know why you don’t like to teach school?” And I said, “No.” “Well,” he said, “when you were a child in school, you delighted in doing nothing more than asking a teacher a question they couldn’t answer. And you are scared to death the students are going to do the same thing to you.”

I went back to the mission field with this great amount of self-knowledge, and I volunteered for every job no other missionary wanted until I got so loaded down I couldn’t teach school. I even was writing the mission paper for the whole Inotete, the native dialect. And I had just settled down in this horrible job that I didn’t want when I got word from Bishop Ruth that he was transferring one of the missionaries from Wembo Nyama to Ketubwe and Virginia Law would take for school. There I was right back in the classroom. And I went into the classroom and said to the students, “Now I don’t have all the answers.

We’ll try to find the answers and sometimes we may never find them because there are unanswerable questions.” And for the first time in my life I enjoyed teaching school because I had honestly confessed to the students my limitations as a teacher.

And several years later the last courtesy that was paid me in Congo was a group of Congolese students who marched up to my house and said to me, “You’re the best teacher we’ve ever had,” with a big bouquet of flowers just before I left to come to America. Now I was the best teacher they’d ever had because I was the first missionary teacher some of those students had ever had so this was no competition. But this had been a joyful experience to me because here I had taken these Congolese students and together we had sought for knowledge that sometimes we didn’t find the answers to. We left them, we didn’t have the resources we needed, but the taking off of a mask and being what you are. It’s impossible for us to express love out of our hearts and lives when we ourselves are behind masks. When we’re putting up fronts to other people. When we’re trying to be something that we are not. You know, I don’t know what one of the greatest problems, personal problems I have now in my own life is the fact that other people try to make me a celebrity.

And I’m not a celebrity. And I often have to almost make a fool of myself to let other people accept me as just one of them. Just one of these people that God has sort of catapulted over into another sphere. Trying to be myself. And not yet to be a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde. In which I’m one personality here and another personality there. And just praying all the time, “Now Lord, just help me to be Virginia Law and nothing else. Just relax me all over. Let me hang loose and be myself.” Because the world tends to want to force us behind a mask. They often… The outside world forces them upon us. Trying to make us be what we’re really not. I arrived in Congo and… I was having the first job to build furniture for our home. We didn’t have any furniture that you could move. One per lady by herself. It usually took two or three Congolese to move even a dining room chair. Because they had big old two by fours underneath. And we were doing some revolutionary furniture making. I had some beautiful material and I covered the living room furniture. One of them with a gold brocade and the other with a lovely red material. Had just finished it when the Women’s Society came from the village to have their meeting in my home.

All the guests had arrived and were sitting around when this one old African Christian came in. Who’d served the Lord longer than I’d lived. All humped over and there was this one gold chair there sitting in the living room. And so I pointed to the chair and I said, “Mama, you sit here,” very carefully in the language. And she looked at me with this real perplexed expression on her face and looked at the chair. And I walked over and I very carefully said, “Now, Ujasi Lindu, you sit here.” And she looked and shrugged her shoulders as much as to say, “Well, she said do it, so I guess she wants me to.” And she crawled up in the chair and squatted with her feet on it. In the only way she knew how to sit. She had never sat in a chair. She didn’t know how you sit in a chair. Well, my first reaction was, “E-gads, don’t sit in my chair like that. Putting your feet in my gold chair.” And I wanted to, you know, yank her out and show her how to sit. And just as quick as anything, the Spirit said to me, “You leave her alone. You let her sit like she knows how to sit. You can’t love the Congolese people if you’ve got to change them to suit you.”

You have to learn to accept people as they are. You have to love them regardless of whether they do it like you want to do it or not. Now, this was a hard lesson for a missionary to learn. But I’m going to be real truthful to you. I learned the hardest lesson I’ve ever learned last summer. I was at Junaluska. And there came to me a very wonderful person who had been very active in lay witness work in the southeastern jurisdiction. I had met this person on many occasions. And I had been thrilled at her witness. She was one of the most vivacious, lovely people I’ve ever known. And she came up to me. And I already had a real sense of love for her. And she said, “Virginia, I want to talk to you. I have a real problem in my life.” So I said, “Why, sure.” And we went down to sit down by the lake to talk. And she began, and she did have a problem, a very deep personal problem that she’d never brought out and really talked to somebody about. And she had come to me. And so we were talking a few minutes when she opened her pocketbook and took out her cigarettes. And I started to say, “Gwen, you can’t smoke.”

And just as quick, the Spirit said to me, “You leave that to Me.” Now, I had come up in a circumstances where you don’t smoke. And I was judging her immediately by my standards. And just as quick as anything, the Spirit said, “You leave her to Me. That’s My problem, not yours.” And then the thought came to me just as quickly. If you reject her smoking, she won’t know it’s a smoking. She will think you are rejecting her because of this problem that she has in her life. And so I began to pray and said, “Now, Lord, just don’t let me notice it.” And amazingly, I found an ability to just ignore it as if it didn’t happen. We talked for some time, had a very marvelous time together. And events since then have proven that this was a turning point in her solution of the problem. And she came through it very victoriously. We went on, and a few days later, she came to me, and she said, “Virginia, I have something else I want you to pray about when you have time.” And I said, “What’s that?” She said, “Would you pray about my smoking?” And I said, “Yes, I will.

If you want me to.” And she said, “Yes, I do.” She said, “You know, when I first found the Lord, I was so thrilled that I could smoke and it didn’t matter. But,” she said, “it’s been bothering me now because I’m counselor for a college group, and I feel that this is not adding to my witness, and I want to stop.” So I went home. Several weeks later, I was praying one morning, and she came to my mind. And I prayed about her, but not anything specific. The second morning again, the third morning when it came to my mind, I started praying about her smoking. The next week, I discovered that at the time and the place where I was praying for Gwen, God released her from the habit. She gives her own witness in the southeastern jurisdiction now, jokingly saying, “If you want to quit smoking, ask Virginia to pray for you.” This is not the case. The point I’m trying to bring out to you is that in coming to accept Gwen as she was, God was able to use me then to become a part of her freedom. There is such a tendency in my own life and in the life of almost all of us to get our yardstick by which we judge God’s children.

And you come up to here, you’re all right, and if you don’t, you’re not. Not realizing that we have to accept people as they are and love them as they are. And by this we are known to be God’s disciples when our lives are full of love for people, even if they’re not what we want them to be.

We were in Congo when the little African children would, one afternoon, suddenly the rain came up in the midst of a class and they put their clothes all at once. They pulled off all their clothes, wadded them up in a little wad, stuck them under their arm and went tearing off home in the nude. And here I was left with the fleeing figures of my students going home. And I was shocked. I was shocked. Why, what a horrible thing, what an uncultured thing to do. Imagine all the class going home without any clothes on. Until I discovered that they didn’t have but one piece of clothing.

And that if they had gone home in that one piece of clothing and it had gotten wet, they would have nothing to have put on to be dry. And I realized that I could not judge them by my judgment. Now, if I pulled off all my clothes and were running down the street, I would need a sanitarium. But this was the wisdom of judgment on their part. To go out with this kind of dress. That we have to try to be understanding to the extent that other people’s lives are not judged by the same circumstances that came into our lives. And as a missionary, this was often the most difficult lesson to learn. When we began to have the temptation to put the American standard on the Congolese, “You are to love as I have loved.” This is the standard that Christ came to. This makes a tremendous demand on us. When I heard that Burley had forgiven the Congolese who shot him, the rebel soldier, my reaction to this was, “Why, you do blame. What does he mean, don’t blame him?” And then there came to my heart the realization that we are to love as Christ loved. When He said, “This is a new commandment I give unto you, that you love, even as I have loved you.”

A standard which demands all that we possibly can have. All that we can possibly give. And yet love becomes the eternal thing, but all else is gone. Love remains. When we came to Scarritt College, Margaret and I, we were… This was Margaret’s first experience in being in a school since she had gotten up older in American school. And it was one of her first experiences of having realized children with problems. That is, noticeable problems. Missionary children are usually fairly protected from so many of those kind of experiences. And she came home so disturbed one day. And she had said, “You know, Mama, we must pray for little Jean because she can’t eat in the dining hall anymore. She spit on the Negro woman who serves the food.” A few days later, she came home and said, “Mother, little Jean can’t ride the bus anymore because she kicked the Negro man that works out there helping to guard the children.” And then she came home and she said, “You know, Mama, we have to really be kind to little Jean. Do you know what, Mother, a Negro killed her daddy?” And as I looked at my 11-year-old daughter and realized that it had never occurred to her that the face of the man that shot her daddy was black, not once, here was the eternal fruit of love.

It would have been utterly impossible for Margaret Ann to have had hate for a black face in her heart when her daddy had loved so deeply the Congolese people. And the circumstances of his death in no way did away with the witness of love that had been his life. The Mumbai’s came to Nashville from Congo. And on the bus the first day, the little Mumbai girl, who’d only been in the States a few months and had learned a very little English, got on the bus. And the little boy stood up and said, “Where are you going to get off?” And she said, “I don’t know.” And he laughed and said, “Ain’t that funny? A nigger on our bus and she don’t even know where she’s going to get off.” And Margaret Ann stood up and said, “She’s going to get off where I get off.” The little Mumbai girl had never seen Margaret Ann. She didn’t even know who she was. But she answered the little boy and said, “Yes, I get off with her.” And she did. When they came to the stop, she got off with Margaret Ann. I would go past the yard where the little Mumbai children played. And in the early part of the fall, they would run out and they would throw up their hands and say, “Mboti, Margaret Ann’s mama.”

And through the year as I passed, they finally said, “Hello, Margaret Ann’s mama.” And finally, they would just run out and say, “Hi, Margaret Ann’s mama.” They learned the English language, but they never learned who I was. I was eternally to them, Margaret Ann’s mama. The fruit and love that lasts in the heart of a child was forever an eternal witness in my own daughter’s life and heart.

In Congo one day, I was asked by a Congolese, “Mama, you call it. Did your mother know that God loved her?” And I said, “Yes, she did.” “Well, did her mother know that God loved her?” And I said, “Yes.” “Did her mother know that God loved her?” And I said, “Yes.” Then she looked at me with a real perplexed look and said, “Mama, you call it. Is there anybody in your family back through the generations that you know who did not know that God loved them?” And I had to admit that there was one. And then she looked very perplexed and said, “Well, why are you so long coming to me?”

This is the question which the church is asked constantly by the world. If you know that God loves you, then why do we let all of these things cloud in and crowd out our hearts and keep us from going out to say to the world, “God loves you too.”

“By this shall all men know that you are my disciples.” And we may go out to do all kinds of marvelous things, but it is only when we learn to love with all of our hearts the individuals for whom Christ died are we really and truly capable or worthy of being called the disciples of our Christ. Shall we pray?

Our Father, we come to You tonight and we do pray that somehow in our hearts a sense of love and understanding may become very real. We ask You, Father, to reveal ourselves to each of us as we really are. We see ourselves only in the light of Christ.

And help us to become what we may be by the grace of God and accept ourselves and surrender to His will. And then, our Father, we ask that You would send us forth to be called Your disciples because we are worthy of that name. We humbly ask for Christ’s sake. Amen.