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Dec 31, 2023 06:00am

Do The Next Thing

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It’s a phrase I never dreamed this Arkansas girl would say, especially in my 60s in 2016, but there it was — “I broke my leg getting out of a Land Rover on my last day in Tanzania when I was headed to a safari in the Serengeti!” (I had been there with three other ladies to do a women’s conference.)
And a little over a month later, I had to bring a copy of the Baptist Trumpet (the weekly newspaper I edited and where I had written about the trip) to prove to the nurses at the rehabilitation facility that it had really happened. No, I wasn’t a patient — my husband had a stroke less than three weeks after I got home from Africa, and I was still in a special boot, pushing his wheelchair down the hall when they asked if I was going to therapy, too!
On top of those two events, my Daddy Bob (who had lived with us for over nine years) passed away on July 6. He was almost 96, and had accepted Jesus Christ as His Savior in his mid 80s, so I knew that he was with Jesus, but my heart still ached for him.
And on top of that, we had begun redoing the floors in our house and found out — right about the time that Daddy went into the hospital — that the doors to the outside deck were damaged and would have to be replaced. That was bad enough, but then we discovered that we had carpenter ant damage and the whole deck would have to be torn down. Since my husband couldn’t do it, that meant I had to deal with all the remodeling — something I knew absolutely nothing about!
The list goes on and on, but you get the picture — it was one of those times when I just folded my arms, looked up at the sky and said, “Well, God, it’s going to be interesting to see how you work this one out!”
Have you been there? Are you there right now? Maybe your life isn’t quite that eventful, but may be at a point where you feel like you just can’t take any more, and that the next event will be the one that “breaks the camel’s back.”
May I share a piece of advice that helped me during that traumatic time in my life? It’s a quote that my mentor shared with me many years ago, and it was originally from a friend of Elisabeth Elliot, whose husband was killed, along with four other missionaries, by a group of Huaorani warriors in Ecuador when he went there to share the gospel with them. When word came to Mrs. Elliot about her husband’s death, she was holding her 10-month-old daughter, Valerie, and she immediately questioned, “What in the world am I going to do?” That’s when her friend gave her this advice that changed her life and has also changed mine:
“Just do the next thing.”
For Mrs. Elliot, the next thing that needed to be done was to change Valerie’s diaper. She did that, then she just kept on doing the next thing… and the next thing… and the next thing. And she not only got through it, she stayed in Ecuador and shared the gospel (the story of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection) with many of the same natives who had killed her husband. That resulted in a whole village accepting Christ as their savior!
For Mrs. Elliot, me and all believers in Christ, we also have the assurance that — regardless of how bad things seem at any given moment — God is still in control and “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).
I’ve always heard that if we all put our troubles in the middle of the room and saw what everyone else was facing, we’d pick up our troubles and take them back home. While that might not always be true, one thing is true — God cares about what we’re going through, and He’ll help us through any situation if we’ll just trust Him and keep on “doing the next thing.”