I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through Him who gives me strength.

-Philippians 4:12, 13

I wrote this week’s posts because of this verse. Well, to be more clear, I wrote because of this verse and a still, quiet voice within that, lately, has been challenging me with a question:

When you’re kicking through the rubble of your life, and all you find is Me, am I enough? (sound familiar?)

What do you do when Jesus asks you a direct question? You answer honestly and get your heart ready for some game-changing growth.

My honest answer? I’m working on my confident “yes”.

I want to be able to claim this Philippians verse as my own. I also want to know the depth of the faith, hope and joy that was present in the hearts of the saints I wrote about this week. I am convinced there is a powerful Truth unfolding as I turn this question over in my mind day after day. My faith is changing. I’m in a season where I am again reading the scriptures as if they are all new to me. The Living Word is challenging me. There are deep-seeded desires of my heart I feel I am being called to loosen my grip from. And yet I also feel restraints, I hadn't noticed before, loosening their grip on me. He is asking me, “Am I Enough?"

The question alone is changing me. So is my answer. It's a game-changer.

What about you? How would your world change if you approached every day with the belief that He is enough? Get your heart ready, because He is looking for your answer.

"Am I Enough?"

Work on your “yes”. We’ll do it together.

In the mean time, here’s a little weekend snacking as you wait for your next dose of Daily Fast Fuel to begin: Check out 2 Corinthians 12:9-10, John 15:5, and Ephesians 3:16-19. And as you begin to ponder whether He is enough, listen to this.

Great jobs come with great benefits. Isn’t that how it works? Medical, Dental and a matching 401k? Or in the case of some of our favorite Biblical heroes, if you work for the Big Fella, aren’t you granted the likes of leadership, land, wisdom, and riches? God has been known to really pull out all the stops for those who serve him in the most special of roles.

But sometimes, when God’s got a special job for you, it doesn’t come with an enticing benefit package. Take Mary, for example. Her job offer started when a blindingly shiny angelic messenger announced, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you!” We all know that Mary accepted with that admirable, “let it be with me” line. But what we don’t know is what this young Jewish girl expected might become of her life as she raised the Son of God. I rather wonder if there wasn’t a small part of Mary that anticipated the “leadership, land, wisdom and riches” of her most revered ancestors. I mean, if YOU were God, with all eternity’s resources at your fingertips, wouldn’t you go out of your way to take care of your Son’s Mom?

Whatever it was that Mary expected, what she got was this: an out-of-wedlock pregnancy that almost cost her dignity, an all-natural child birth experience with the odor of farm animals to help keep her focused, a life of humble means married to the local carpenter, and many years of child-rearing that were so ordinary no one chose to write about them (Of course, except that one time when she lost God’s kid at the festival … thanks for documenting THAT). And let’s not forget the worst…she had to watch her son die in the most unbelievable manner.

So why did Mary accept the job? Simply put, Mary got Jesus.

No land. No leadership. No wisdom. No riches. Just Jesus.

As it turns out, the shiny messenger mentioned this perk when he spelled out Mary’s benefit package in the beginning: “Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son. His name will be Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”

Did you catch that? No land. No leadership. No wisdom. No riches. Just Jesus.

Hey reader! Guess what? You have found favor with God! You get Jesus.

You get Jesus.

One evening we went out and rescued four people off the streets. One of them was in a desperate condition. I told the sisters, "You take care of the others. I will care or this one who is worse off." I did everything for her that my love could do. I put her into bed, and I saw a beautiful smile light up her face. She squeezed my hand and only managed to say two words, "Thank you." And then she closed her eyes.

I couldn't help but ask myself there beside her body, "What would I have said if I had been in her place?" My answer was very simple. I would have said that I was hungry, that I was dying, that I was cold. Or I would have said that this or that part of my body hurt or something like that. But she gave me much more. She gave me her grateful love. And she died with a smile on her face.

- Mother Theresa

Founded in 1952, Kalighat Nirmal Hriday, or the Home of the Pure Heart for the dying and destitute of Calcutta, is Mother Theresa’s flagship ministry. Though this “flagship” has served as a launching point for a countless web of other ministries worldwide, the vision of its originating purpose was quite simple: Go out into the streets. Find those who are destitute and dying alone. Bring them back to Nirmal Hriday. Bathe them. Clothe them. Let them die with dignity, knowing that in their final moments they were loved.

It is with the residents of Nirmal Hriday in mind that I puzzle over the misleading “prosperity gospel” understanding of Jeremiah 29:11’s promises of prosperity, hope, safety and a special plan for one’s future. I am reminded of a line from The Princess Bride, altered slightly here for my purposes: “You keep using that verse. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

What if, in our final days, it didn’t matter whether we could look back on our life and say, “Wasn’t that something?”

What if, in our final days, it mattered more that we could look back on our life and say, “Isn’t He something?”

Fast Fuel for thought…

Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. – Genesis 15:13

So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor…They made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields, in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly. – Exodus 1:11,14

I have a soft place in my heart for those in the Bible whose stories were recorded while their names were not. There are many such people whose lives have something to teach us, but it is the Hebrew slaves in Egypt who have long caught my attention. We know almost nothing about their existence "pre-Moses" except the description above from Exodus and the fact that they were enslaved for 400 years. We also know that they cried out to the Lord in their misery and trusted that Yahweh would eventually provide them the freedom they so deeply desired (Exodus 2:23-25).

What we don’t know is how, in a time span that could have yielded as many as twelve generations*, these oppressed people kept the faith. When their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents many times over did not see the Lord grant them freedom from slavery, why did they continue to cry out to Him? Why did they continue to believe that they were a chosen people when the suffering of generations of Hebrew slaves seemed to clearly indicate that they had been forgotten? How did they trust when there were overwhelming reasons to doubt?

Under the circumstances, holding onto trust for 400 years seems fruitless and not a little crazy. That is, unless, we consider that these nameless many saw a deeper truth of God despite their difficult days. Perhaps they knew then what has since been written for us to know now: That even the worst of hardships, persecutions, famine and violence cannot separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:35, 38,39).

I pray that all of us may begin to more fully understand a Presence of Love so powerful that it overcomes all obstacles and sustains hope for generation upon generation.

*”How Long is a Generation?” By Donn Devine, CG, CGI; Ancestry Magazine; September/October 2005; Vol. 23, No. 5

Often I have heard people say, “How good God is. We prayed that it would not rain for our church picnic, and look at this lovely weather!” Yes, God is good when He sends good weather. But God was also good when he allowed my sister Betsie to starve to death before my eyes in the German concentration camp.**

Corrie ten Boom, watchmaker, writer, and concentration camp survivor, has had a huge impact on my understanding of God’s goodness apart from material provision. Corrie and her family believed it their Christian obligation to care for God’s people, the Jews, during the German occupation of Holland. They were ultimately imprisoned for establishing and running an underground network which moved Jewish people into hiding and, if possible, out of Holland and beyond the reach of the Nazis. If you read her story, “The Hiding Place”, you will be in awe of the powerful ways God protected their underground work. But when you read about her time in prison and later, Ravensbrück concentration camp, you may be more so in awe at the power of God’s provision simply through His presence.

Where Jesus did not give Corrie and Betsie freedom from humiliation, abuse, starvation, and exposure to the rawest form of evil, He unfailingly gave them more of Himself. In the very midst of their suffering, with no promise of its end, Jesus gave them His ability to let go of anger and embrace forgiveness (Luke 23:34). This deeper understanding of God’s promise of provision led Corrie to become a “tramp for the Lord, going wherever I could tell what I had learned: that when the worst happens in the life of a child of God, the best remains and the very best is yet to be.”**

**Corrie ten Boom’s “Clippings from My Notebook”