I was nine or so when my Mom first told me the story of a young Jewish girl. She was about my age when the Nazis came and dragged her family away to a brutal concentration camp. Within weeks her family had perished, their smoke curling gray from the prison stacks. Somehow, one day, she found her way to a hole in the mighty, concertina covered wall, and faded through it like a ghostly shadow when the officers weren’t looking. She stumbled across a cave some miles away and crept gratefully into its blackness. Who knows what happened after that? Maybe the rains caused a landslide that buried the cave mouth. Or perhaps, she backed further and further in, terrified eyes fixed on the light until it grew too small to be seen. Then her hands could not feel their way back out.
Whatever the case, someone stumbled on that cave long after the Liberation. They found two things: one was the fragile skeleton of a child. The other was etched on the opposite wall, “My God, you are my all in all…”
What if God held out His hands and asked you to give up everything? If serving Him meant that you would live without light, love, happiness, and security. If it meant suffering day by day, never to marry, find friendship, or enjoy security: in short, to give up on all that humanity values, what would you say? How far will you take your faith?
“If any man comes after me, He must deny Himself, take up His cross and follow me.” God has called to to absorb ourselves in Him, burning our will as a sacrifice before Him. No personal goal shall supersede Him in our thoughts or activities. God loves us more than we can imagine and will not willingly cause us to suffer, but someday, He may allow persecution, physical suffering, and such relational tumult as may never be resolved in this life. We will have waived the right to even ask ‘why’.
Now is the time to evaluate our priorities. Are we holding tightly to a possession, relationship, or career? If so, we will resist God when He removes it from our grasp, instead of responding with trust and poise. When you lay down their last dream to follow hard after God, you might break. It’s like dying. Then, you will feel the breath of God like you never have before. Suddenly, He will be your all in all. Neither riches nor poverty will be able to move you.
So if God takes our dearest desires, and even the basic elements that seem to be unalienable human rights, if He beckons us into a labyrinthine cave, never again to see the light of day, will the skeleton of our will be found to testify, “You are all in all…”?
Note: I have researched the story in this article and cannot easily locate evidence to back it, so I make no claims regarding its authenticity. However, its effect is certainly a poignant one.
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