“The promise of God given to me as a young girl is coming to pass with every small detail today,” Jacqueline told me. “Yes, it is dangerous sometimes, but it is like a fire in my heart. There is fear and concern about what I am doing, but I can’t extinguish this passion, and after the revolution in Egypt, there is a great window of opportunity to make a difference. So for now I walk step by step.”
The Bible says, “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” Injustices like bullying, hate crimes, religious persecution, and other human rights violations are responsible for much suffering in this world. I would never advise you to put yourself in harm’s way, as Jackie has done, but if you are a victim, or if you know of someone who is being abused, please notify someone in a position to help. Put your faith in action against oppression and injustice in any way that you can. And most of all, pray for a world in which every individual is allowed to live unharmed and in peace while pursuing God’s purpose.
Will you pray for yourself first? Pray that, if you are doing anything that can be seen as a seed of death through persecution or gossip or bullying, He would help you to change. Will you pray that God guards your heart when people put you down? Without prayer we are weak, but with it, we have His strength behind us.
Will you also pray with me that this generation will be the generation to stop being bystanders, that it will stand up to help instead? Pray for your school, pray for your bullies, pray for your heart that we may all remain alert for ways to make a difference in this world.
EIGHT
Letting Go to Reach Higher
MY REMARKABLE FRIENDS GARY AND MARILYN SKINNER CAME UP WITH a modest plan in 1983. They had already married and started a family in Marilyn’s native Canada. But Gary, who comes from a long line of missionaries and grew up in Zimbabwe, felt God’s calling him to plant a small church in war-torn Kampala, the capital of Uganda.
Their mission to plant a church may have been simple, but the decision to leave the safety of Canada was not. Uganda was in the middle of a violent civil war in which hundreds of thousands were killed or displaced. Guerrillas, thieves, murderers, drought, and sickness had transformed the resource-rich country once known as “the Pearl of Africa” into one of the poorest nations in the world. The chaos and strife of war was exacerbated by a raging epidemic of HIV/AIDS, which had destroyed Uganda’s social fabric as well.
Within just two years of opening their church, this dedicated Christian couple added another major task to their mission after finding scores of children wandering the countryside, abandoned in urban refuse piles and even bound and left to die. “We had the highest infection rate in the world at that time. I strongly felt God say, ‘Look after My children,’ ” Gary told me when I visited with him and his wife and their three children a few years ago.
Marilyn said, “God wasn’t impressed with how great our church was. He told us to look after the orphan children. The cries of children offend God greatly.”
They began Watoto Child Care Ministries in a small rented house, but their ambitions were much bigger than any one house could contain: to provide needy children with homes, education, and medical care in a nation with an estimated two million orphans.
On a speaking tour in Africa, I visited one of the three incredible sanctuaries the Skinners have created for more than two thousand children. On their neat, beautiful grounds, groups of eight children live with a foster mother in more than two hundred homes. Each village offers schools and medical clinics with electricity, running water, and flushing toilets. These modern amenities, rare in most of Uganda, have been provided largely by volunteers from around the world who pitched in to help the Skinners’ incredible example of faith in action.
Many of the children arrive at Watoto as newborns and remain through their teenage years, but the Skinners also provide financial support so that qualified young people can obtain secondary education degrees and establish productive lives. More than fifty Watoto children are pursuing advanced degrees now. Many more will follow. On average the village’s baby-homes receive fifteen abandoned or orphaned infants a month. Many of those who come to Watoto are HIV positive, but treatment with antiretrovirals and their mothers’ antibodies usually clears the virus from their bodies, according to the Skinners.
The Skinners have had incredible success despite decades of continuous warfare, destruction, and atrocities around them. As recently as 2004, an estimated twenty thousand children were abducted by rebels who forced the boys to terrorize their own communities as guerrillas. Girls were raped and forced into sex slavery.
The motto for Watoto is Rescue, Raise, Rebuild. Their goal is to rescue the generation that has been lost to war, sickness, and poverty and to transform those who have survived into educated and productive Christian leaders equipped and willing to rebuild the nation. The Skinners also minister to the needs of the region’s many impoverished and abused women through the Living Hope program, which teaches them life skills and offers vocational training and counseling to give them purpose, dignity, and a future.
Marilyn told me that they continued their work despite robberies, threats, and violence over the years. More than once they have courageously gone into the most dangerous regions to do God’s work. A few years ago the Skinners undertook a mission into lawless northern Uganda to rescue some children enslaved by the rebel forces. Often the Skinners have not known how they would accomplish their enormous mission under such difficult conditions, but time after time they’ve put their faith into action and surrendered all to God.
“In the beginning we wanted just to plant our church and preach, but God said that He didn’t send us to Uganda to do what we wanted. He sent us to do His work by serving the hurting people,” Marilyn said. Even so, their church now serves more than twenty thousand members in eight locations. Their mission is still growing, because the need is enormous, Gary said. “But our God is great, and we believe that we can make a difference,” he added.
Today, much of the world knows of the Skinners and their incredible ministry because of the performances of the renowned Watoto Children’s Choir, which records music and travels the globe performing Concerts of Hope and raising funds so they can keep growing their mission to do not what they want but what God wants.
THE POWER OF SURRENDER
The concept of surrender can be difficult to grasp because most of us associate the term with failure, quitting, or giving up. When the Skinners surrendered their initial plans in Uganda to follow God’s greater plan, they did not give up anything but the illusion that they were in control. They realized that God, in all His wisdom, had a larger vision for them, one that surpassed any plan they could have conceived in Canada.
Quitting would have meant leaving Africa and its millions of needy souls. Instead, they accepted that their heavenly Father knows best. They trusted God and said, “We don’t know how we will possibly do what You want us to do, but we will trust in Your wisdom and rely on Your strength to fulfill the purpose You have designed for us.”
You undoubtedly have to practice surrender in your own life—times when you have to give up trying to direct those things that are beyond your control and focus instead on doing your best, one step at a time, using all the gifts and talents and skills and brainpower at your disposal. You probably have done this without thinking about it. Maybe you’ve had to change careers because of the bad economy or a lost job. You didn’t quit. Instead, you just accepted that circumstances beyond your control had changed the situation. You adjusted your plans based on the opportunities that remained, and then proceeded with confidence in your ability to survive and thrive.
What happens to you doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you respond. As a Christian, my response is to let go and let God show me His plan. I can always tell when I’m out of sync with what He wants for me. In those times I feel frustrated, lost, and depressed—just like I felt as a boy
approaching adolescence while trying to figure out how I could survive, let alone thrive, in a world designed for people with arms and legs. I was hung up on figuring out my entire life when God already had His plan in place.
Surrendering is about giving up the illusion that you are in the driver’s seat. Yes, you do decide how you act, when you act, and the attitude you present to the world. Yes, you should dream and have goals for your life based on your passion. But it is an illusion to think you can determine what happens to you and around you. So all we really can do is prepare ourselves to manage the worst and do our best. That means developing our gifts to their full potential so that whatever happens, we have faith in our ability to persevere and plunge ahead.
The need to control everything around us can actually be a handicap. Here’s an example that I can’t do myself, but you probably can. Right now, clench your fist as tightly as you can. You have power over your hand this way, right? So if someone offered you the key to a brand-new BMW, would you pass up that opportunity just to remain in control, or would you relax your fist so you could receive the gift? It’s the same with our lives. When we spend all our time trying to remain in control, we risk missing the blessings that may come by putting faith into action and letting go. If the Skinners had stuck with their humble dream to plant and minister a church in Uganda, they would have missed the far greater opportunity to have a positive influence on thousands of people and perhaps even the nation itself.
I would never advise you to give up on a dream, but I do encourage you to open up your life to the greatest possibilities and opportunities by surrendering absolute and continuous control. The whole thing about achieving victory through surrender is hard to grasp, unless you are married, of course. I’m joking! Well, maybe not entirely … I believe that when you commit to a loving relationship with someone, you surrender many things. You surrender selfishness and self-centered behavior. You surrender the need to always be right. And, of course, you surrender the television remote control!
On a deeper spiritual level, when you commit to a loving relationship with God, you surrender to His plan for your life, and suddenly the act of surrendering loses any and all negative connotations. Instead, it becomes a joyous and empowering experience. Many times I’m asked how I can claim a ridiculously good life when I have no arms and legs. My inquisitors assume I’m suffering from what I lack. They inspect my body and wonder how I could possibly give my life to a God who allowed me to be born without limbs. Others have attempted to soothe me by saying that God has all the answers and, that when I’m in heaven one day, I will find out His intentions. Instead, I chose to believe and live by what the Bible says, which is that God is the answer today, yesterday, and always.
When people read about my life or witness me living it, they are prone to congratulate me for being victorious over my disabilities. I tell them that my victory came in surrender. It comes every day when I acknowledge that I can’t do this on my own. So I say to God, “I give it to You!” Once I yielded, the Lord took my pain and turned it into something good, which brought me real joy.
What was that something good? For me, it was purpose and significance. My life mattered. When I could not find meaning and purpose for my life, I surrendered the need to do that, and God stepped in. He gave my life meaning when no one and nothing else could provide it.
If you like word games, here’s another way to understand what happens in my life each day. Put the word Go in front of the word disabled, and with a little creative visualization, you’ll suddenly be looking at “God is abled.” There you have it. I may be disabled but God is abled. He makes all things possible. Where I am weak, He is strong. Where I have limitations, He has none. So my life without limits is the result of my surrendering to Him all my plans, dreams, and desires. I don’t quit, but I do surrender. I give up all my plans so that He can show me His path for me.
The Bible is filled with references to this, telling us, “I am the LORD your God who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you.” Scripture also says, “I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under [your] burdens” and “ ‘I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”
In the Old Testament, God told Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a sacrifice to atone for sin. Abraham went along but did not tell Isaac. He just asked his son to accompany him to what Isaac thought would be a ceremony to sacrifice a lamb on the mountain. While they were walking up the slope, Isaac asked where the lamb was. Abraham said that God would provide it, but then, when they reached the mountaintop, the father told his son that he was to be the sacrifice.
Isaac did not fight back. He, too, surrendered to God’s will, knowing that God’s way is the ultimate way, no matter what we feel or desire. Fortunately for Isaac, this was a test of faith. As Abraham was about to stab Isaac, an angel intervened and stopped him.
There were two examples of surrender in this story because Abraham and Isaac both surrendered to God’s will based on their faith. We must do the same in our lives, realizing that where we are weak, He is strong. In Scripture, God said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” So when God tells us to dream big, we can do so, knowing He can make it happen.
If you have surrendered in faith to God and life keeps throwing obstacles at you, tap into His grace and say, “If it is Your will to achieve this dream, help me.” I believe God’s path is the one that leads us to fulfilling our greatest potential. My advice is to know all you can and then surrender the outcome to His knowledge. Over time the puzzle will work itself out. As the Bible says, “His wisdom is profound, his power is vast.”
You may be preparing to make a move, standing on the ledge but paralyzed by fear because you aren’t sure you can do it. Try giving it to God instead. What will it take for you to trust this to Him? I encourage you to count the cost of what your life might be like without Him, without the Lord in all your decisions. Believe His promises for you today. Let Him be your joy and satisfaction. Ask God to be the One to define the purpose of your life for your life. Ask Him for the faith you’ll need to do so.
When I released my bitterness over my lack of limbs, I didn’t let it go for nothing. I had faith that God would step in. I believed His divine power would pull me through regardless of what I lacked. When I gave it to God, I felt a strength that was beyond me. The little faith I had was stretched beyond anything I thought possible. He has graciously let me be a part of changing people’s lives. God changed me on the inside so I could be used as a chosen vessel unto Him to bear His name around the world. When I put my faith into action and surrendered my plans to Him, I began a new life of incredible joy and fulfillment beyond anything I could have imagined.
GIVING IT TO GOD
A few years ago a young woman told me her powerful story of surrender, one that surely will move and inspire you too. She began her e-mail in a very straightforward manner: “My name is Jessica. I am twenty-six years old now, and I was diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer when I was eighteen years old.”
Jessica had graduated from high school in Pleasanton, California, and had just started her first year at California State University, Hayward, when she went to a doctor for a sinus infection that wouldn’t go away. The doctor was surprised to find a large tumor in her sinus cavity. It was an advanced form of a malignant cancer that usually affects older Asian males. She was neither Asian nor male (obviously), but the diagnosis was correct. Her treatment was intense and painful.
This young woman was subjected to forty-five minutes of radiation a day, five days a week for several months in combination with about six months of chemotherapy. The radiation severely burned the inside of her throat, and the chemotherapy nauseated her continuously. She could not eat or keep food down, so her doctors had to feed her through a tube to keep her strong enough to withstand the treatments.
When Jessica
was diagnosed with cancer, her dreams seemed to crash. She had to quit college in her freshman year and give up her part-time job because she was so sick she could barely get out of bed. The chemotherapy took her hair. The radiation burned her throat so she could not eat. Her pain was, in her words, “horrible, off the charts.”
Despite her agony and suffering, Jessica chose that moment to put her faith into action through surrender. “It was during that time that my heart started focusing in the right direction,” she said. “When you are that close to eternity, it makes you really examine your life to make sure you are right with your Savior. I wanted to make sure that my heart was truly committed. I did not want to just rest on some profession of faith; I wanted to make sure my life was backing it up.”
I wrote earlier that God does not make us sick, but He does use illnesses and other major challenges to draw us closer to Him so that we put Him at the center of our lives. Sickness is part of the natural world; God’s love is of the spiritual realm. You can see God at work in Jessica’s life. Just as her serious health problems wracked her earthly body, He fortified her spiritual self.
“It seemed as if God were saying to me, ‘Now that everything you relied on is taken away, are you still going to love Me? Do you love Me for what I give you or for who I am?’ ” she said. “At that time I made a decision to follow the Lord for who He was. I realized He wanted me to focus on what really counted in life, which was getting to know Him better, leading souls to Him and living for heaven.”
The good news is that once she’d undergone her painful treatments, Jessica was cancer-free. Still, the cure took a toll that has hampered her speech and her ability to swallow food normally. Yet even with those lingering side effects, she surrendered all bitterness and self-pity and chose gratitude instead. “Glory be to God, I have my sight, most of my hearing, and—even though I have a harder time—I can still talk and sing,” she wrote in her e-mail. “That is the physical aspect of what went on with me, but let me tell you the other side to my story, which is the message of hope I pray that I can pass on to other people who are in a similar situation as myself.”