Month: September 2013

In the book, Handicaps, Volume One, the sixth book in the Call Back Series, we read of a young missionary named Fay Goddard, who had gone to the Philippines, learned the language and customs of the people she had come to serve, when devastating polio suddenly “laid bands upon her limbs and she was compelled to be confined to a wheelchair. Back at the Overseas Missionary headquarters in Philadelphia, she found herself “stuffing envelopes, licking stamps, and trying to be busy at whatever others could scrape up for her to do. I was at a dead end, on a shelf,” she tells us. What had been the purpose of all her language study, she asked herself? And her slow but steady entrance into the hearts of the people she had come to love? Had that too been a waste?

It was at that point that she and God had a very frank conversation. She had previously prayed, “Do whatever You want with me, Lord, whatever it takes to accomplish what you want me to do.” But stuffing envelopes and licking stamps–was this God’s perfect way?

“Remember Job?” the Lord interjected. Of course she remembered Job! Opening her Bible, Fay read once more Satan’s charge that Job was not serving God for nothing. ”Well, Satan could say the same about you,” the Lord challenged.” These words might have seemed harsh, but Fay knew them to be only too true. Living in her little grass-roofed house “on a plateau on the edge of a deep valley and within view of the blue-gray mountains” was where she wanted to stay for the rest of her life.

“Now I am asking you to do something you don’t want to do,” God told her. I want you to show Satan that you love me enough to do even this for Me. And I want you to do it with joy.” (Handicaps, p. 14). Fay took the challenge and within days found herself the editor of East Asia’s Millions where suddenly, all the pieces seemed to fit together. Her previous life-experience now came into play. She had all the challenge she needed in a job for which she proved a perfect fit.