Two eternal values can carry us when life is difficult

For three years I had probably seen a dozen different doctors, seeking help for a cluster of really distressing symptoms. Usually, they would conclude the tests and visits by looking up from their notes and saying something like this:

“I don’t know why you are sick. Frankly, I don’t know what to do for you.”

For reasons I can’t explain, those symptoms blew up into a critical health jolt a few years ago, landing me for a week’s stay in Saint Alphonsus Hospital in Boise, Idaho.

According to my specialist, that 7-day period marked the finale of three years of a severe gastrointestinal post-infectious disease syndrome. Most likely, I brought the vicious bug back with me from India. And it might well have taken my life.

On the day my wife Nancy rushed me to the ER, I had been speaking at two consecutive Sunday morning services at a local church. We had been scheduled to leave two days later to fly to Myanmar to explore and open up a new ministry.

The first service was difficult in the extreme. And the second service? Only the grace of God and his angels got me through it.

Sweating profusely and gripping the pulpit for dear life, I remember thinking, I’m going to black out and fall off this platform in front of all of these people.

I asked God for help under my breath, paused long enough to create a buzz in the congregation (really alarming Nancy), and somehow managed to stagger through to the end of the message.

Desperately sick as I was that day—and for days to come—the peace of God covered me.

Have you noticed? The difficult events of our lives have a way of hammering out the non-essentials.

Corrie Ten Boom, a survivor of three Nazi death camps, once wrote, “Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.”

Even though I’ve never been one to hang onto material things, it was in that hospital room that I sank my roots even deeper into the soil of God’s kingdom values. Two distinct images remain illuminated in my mind’s eye from that experience with a life-threatening illness: the cross that hung over the hospital room door, and my wife asleep on a Naugahyde chair beside my bed.

What are the eternal values that carried me through that season and many others? Loving God. Loving people.

In so many ways beyond our awareness, God has chosen to shape eternity through us. I’ve said for years that everything a Christ-follower does is connected to eternity. American theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote that “we create ripples that go on forever ... .” And so we do.

Only Jesus can take us off the revolving wheel of all the “isms” in the world, with their narrow and distorted ways of seeing things. The values that last forever are only found in the fertile soil of faith in the God of the Bible.

God has wise reasons for allowing us to pass through this current worldwide pandemic. Someone has aptly described it as pushing a reset button. As followers of Jesus, we have allowed too many lesser concerns to cloud our vision and dilute our impact.

In that hospital in Boise, drifting in and out of awareness, neither knowing nor fearing what would come next, I took a fresh grip on the two values that will carry me into eternity.

Loving Jesus. Loving people in his name.

Everything else is small potatoes.