Someone saw the title on my debit card today and asked me about my degree field. I'm always quick to say that I'm not an M.D. Although I will debate a medical doctor under the table, the subject being my chosen field of study.
Aren't you glad God didn't make us all alike, and don't you love to excel in the gifts he has given you and the education with which he has blessed you? That's our responsibility. We are not the be all and end all, as my friend Lorna used to say. (I love and miss my SC friend!)
I learned a verse of scripture when I was a kid in the Baptist GA's that has stayed with me my entire life. It goes like this: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might..." (Ecclesiastes 9:10). From the time I was nine years old, I always thought that verse was written to me. It was my instruction for doing life in a big way. To me, I was to go about my appointed activities as if they were going to change the world, no matter how small or large.
In between reading the last two in the Eugenia Price Georgia Trilogy, I've almost finished her life story. I'm glad I stopped to read it. Now I can go back to the enormous book that smacks me on the head when I fall asleep, giving me just slight of a concussion. You can know where a person is coming from if you read their life story. After her conversion, she was the feistiest, busiest, doing-ist woman I could ever imagine. And she never stopped until the day she died.
But before her salvation experience, she was a self-determined atheist. She just could not bring herself to believe there was a God, much less... believe in God, believe that he could change someone as committed to non-belief as she. And then one day someone showed up in her life who determined not to give up on her.
In reflecting upon the days before she came to know Christ as her personal Savior, she said this—
"Self-deception is very very heavy.
Fear is very heavy.
Worry is very heavy.
The heaviest thing of all is to have no beginning and no end. All of life was a burden.
A very heavy burden.
But Christ said, 'My yoke is easy. My burden is light. Come unto me.' I did. And found the burden to be light."
What a terrific loss it would have been if Eugenia Price had maintained status quo in the unbeliever-state. She was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. Her bestselling historical novels follow me to my room every night, and they will until I have read them all. And when I've read those last words each night, we tune our radio to the old program called "Unshackled" for which Miss Price wrote the script for Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago for years. It must have come easy. For she, herself, was shackled in chains of sin for so many wasted years. She pursued her Christian life with all the gusto she could muster, just like she did everything else BC (as she called her life before Christ).
And one day, I will drive up to St. Simons Island, Georgia and trace the footsteps in her wonderful historical fiction stories based on actual people who lived there. She is buried in Christ Church cemetery alongside the real people about whom she wrote. On her tombstone, these words are written: "After her conversion to Jesus Christ, October 2, 1949, she wrote Light...and eternity and love and all are mine at last."
I want to tell you more about Eugenia Price in another post. But I am working on something in my own life, something she has stirred within me. Jim Cymbala, Pastor of The Brooklyn Tabernacle, best describes what I'm talking about when he "calls us back to fresh faith—to a fiery, passionate preoccupation with God that will restore what the Enemy has stolen from us."
Remember, we're not the be all and end all. The Enemy, Satan, is no respecter of persons when it comes to theft. Jesus came to seek and to save. Satan came to kill, to steal, and to destroy.
I'll leave you to ponder this as I do. Are you passionately preoccupied with Christ?
Jane Bennett Gaddy, Ph.D.
House Not Made With Hands
The Mississippi Boys
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