BECAUSE of God's Goodness

[short] Story of Amy Wilson Carmichael

She was a missionary to India for 55 years. When she was a little girl she had one prayer. [all of us had mixed up prayers when we were kids, but this prayer was very important to Amy.] All the little girls in her neighborhood had blue eyes, but she had brown eyes. She prayed for years that God would change her brown eyes to blue.

As she got into her 20's, she began ministering to the poor and then felt the call to India. When she got to India, she realized that many of the parents were selling their daughters into sexual slavery to be temple prostitutes. She prayed about what she could do to help these girls.

God gave her the idea to take coffee grounds to dye her skin darker [to look like the Indian women] so that she could go into these places to rescue these girls one-by-one. She got an orphanage going and people supported her financially. Over 55 years they rescued thousands of girls.

But she tells a story that one day she's in front of the mirror putting coffee grounds on her face and as she was looking in the mirror all of the sudden she realized, "God, EVERY Indian girl has brown eyes. YOU gave me these brown eyes so that I could do what I love to do to... to help these girls". And she said, "God You Are So Good".

This story was told at the end of Pastor Robert's message today titled God Is Good. Honestly, you can look at this story and see so much more than the simple [focused] fact that God gave Amy brown eyes. She truly was one of the first, if not the first, missionary whose ministry was to save girls from human trafficking. I guess I could say, "That's another Oprah altogether."

But the point remains... God created her exactly as He needed her to be to fulfill His intended purpose for her life. He knew where He wanted her to go and what He wanted her to do and because of that purpose, He needed her to have... as simple as it sounds... brown eyes. I find it so incredibly interesting that the one thing she can remember praying for throughout her childhood was that God would change her eye color.

Could it be that Satan saw the mantle already placed on her life at such a tender age and began pointing out that difference to her so that it became something she disliked about herself when, in fact, it would be the one thing that she would need to accomplish her life's purpose?

"Satan will try to get us to judge God's INFINITE goodness based on our FINITE mind."

This is another quote from Pastor Robert. It's not far-fetched to believe that [as a little girl] Amy may have, in her heart, judged God 'not good' because her eye color was different from all the other girls in her neighborhood. Her desire was 'to be like them', yet she couldn't have known then that God never intended for her to be like everyone else. He had already set her apart by, of all things, giving her brown eyes.

I have so many questions running through my mind right now, but the biggest one is this:

What have I doubted or disliked or questioned or frowned upon... or wished to be different or changed... simply because I couldn't see in my finite mind, as it fit into my finite world, that it was necessary to fulfill God's infinite purpose?