Stories from God: Everyday People Experiencing God in Extraordinary Ways

Chapter 9: Three Final Stories

     There are several things that all the stories in this book have in common. Every story displays God's love and concern for His creation. Every story illustrates that He remains in total control. Most important, they all involve God interacting with mankind. Far from being an invisible, unknowable, aloof God, they all show that God is very active in our lives. He constantly teaches us, directs us, heals us, talks to us, protects us and otherwise works in our lives.

There is something else important about these stories. They explain why the Bible continues to be relevant to our lives today, even though it was written thousands of years ago. The Bible is still relevant because God has not changed. The same stories that were written in the Bible are repeated in our lives every day. The way God interacted with people in Biblical times is the way He interacts with us today. As such we should not be surprised when God speaks to us, when He heals us, when He answers our prayers, or when He demands our obedience. He does not ask any more or any less of us today than He asked of Abraham, David, Peter, or Paul. Hence, the stories we encounter in the Bible ring true because they reflect our own lives. This is the point of this book.

This is a book that is hard to finish, in part because I have been so blessed while writing it.

I do not want to stop. It is also hard to finish because the stories themselves never end. As I write this, more stories are coming in, and it is hard not to find a place for them in this book. I have to stop somewhere, however, and this is it. I conclude with three special stories that I think best illustrate the point of this book and summarize all the other stories.

The first is the story of Jan. It is a powerful, dramatic story of God's redemptive work in the life of a friend. It captures so much of the content of the stories in this book that in a way it summarizes many of the ways in which God acts in our lives today. Her story should inspire us when times become difficult.

The second story comes from Ricky, but it is really the story of one of his victims. It is a short but powerful story of forgiveness, which almost brought me to tears. It taught me that we can at times do things that are humanly impossible but spiritually necessary.

The third is the story of David. It is about as different from Jan's story as any story could be. It is a quiet simple story of God brushing His hand across a life. There is no drama or miracle in David's story, but the whole point of the story is that God is there even in the quiet moments. That is perhaps the most important lesson for us to learn.

The Deliverance of Jan

I hardly know how to begin this story. It involves the total breakdown of a family and the redemption of that family through the power of Christ. It is the story of a friend named Jan. Her story is the closest one to a modern day Job story that I have ever encountered.

The breakdown in Jan's family took place over several years, as if everything that Job experienced played out in slow motion in Jan's life. Where Job lost his children in a moment, Jan watched her children slowly descend into the pit over the years. Where Job quickly lost his fortune, Jan's family finances melted down like an ice cube left out on the kitchen counter. Where Job's health rapidly deteriorated, Jan's eroded slowly.

The details are, at times, so horrendous that I find it hard to even write them down. In fact, I have chosen only to include a few of the details of Jan's painful odyssey, because the real power of this story is not the depths to which Jan descended but the heights to which God raised her. It is more a story about resurrection than a story of death.

Initially, it appeared that God had blessed Jan's family life. Both she and her husband were dutifully working in the church. Her children attended church. Everything seemed to be working for them.