Last month I ran into a neighborhood acquaintance I first met last fall watching the final minutes of a Bears game inside a corner sports hangout (this particular Thursday night matchup with the New Orleans Saints was only broadcast on cable TV and I just had to see the ending after learning from the internet it went into overtime).

After cheering the Bears dramatic 27-24 victory, and before putting my coat back on to leave, I asked this 50-something woman if she was a Believer and she gave me a clear gospel testimony that she was, classifying herself as a “non-practicing Catholic.”

A few months later, on an extremely bitter, single-digit January evening, I ran into the woman on the street and quickly learned she had just become homeless. Basically, she lost her long-term career job, broke up with her long-term live-in boyfriend and moved in with her sister who had died only one week before from a very unexpected illness. Since there was no cash around to pay her sister’s rent, the landlord threw her out as someone who wasn’t named on the lease, etc.

I had the woman stay inside my apartment (which I share with three roommates at the elderly house where I work) on the living room couch. In the morning, I gave her a fresh set of clothes (including heavy socks), a pair of heavyweight winter gloves and $40 in cash.

So, when I ran into her this last time, she told me she’d inherited a little money from her sister’s death and that she was now living with her ex-husband who she said could be verbally and physically abusive toward her. She still did not have a job.

In discussing her situation with her, helping her lay out some possible housing options, she said to me with tears in her eyes something like, “Being a sensitive, sentimental person stinks. It just eats you up.”

Wow, I thought, if that doesn’t sound like a familiar struggle! All you need to add in is a dose of self-pity--something I’m famous for—and it’s as if you’re a powder keg ready to blow. I went down that road so long and hard last year I about committed suicide.

In fact, truth be known, I actually did make a really lame attempt one evening last summer when I thought I could bear no more from life.

I stupidly took the advice of a church friend (believe it or not!) who explained how if I really wanted to do myself in I could simply use a piece of a garden hose strung up from my car’s exhaust pipe through a crack in my back window and sit in the back seat with the engine running inside an airtight garage.

Thank God NOTHING happened—for one thing, I couldn’t find an empty garage so I slept all night with the car running inside an abandoned farm yard hidden under a clump of trees!

*****

The thing I never stop being grateful for is I truly do have the secure knowledge of God’s deep, deep, abiding love for me to bolster me. I can’t fathom for a second how other people manage without it.

I realize how incredibly fortunate I am to have been raised in the Truth, becoming saved as a young child (just as my brother and sister were too) and having had many true Christians (my parents being the most crucial) and churches (not to mention all the missionaries from around the globe who were early-childhood mentors when my dad served as a doctor for the worldwide HCJB missionary outfit in Shell, Ecuador in the early ’70s) to guide me—most especially Shorewood Bible Church, which I have attended since 1991.

*****

Here’s a great passage from Jordan I randomly hit upon the other day when I was digging through a stack of CDs in my car for something to play while sitting in traffic:

“In II Corinthians, Paul’s using his own life as nowhere else. It’s the most personal epistle actually in the New Testament, period. And he’s using his own life, his own ministry, his own situation—bearing his own heart, not in order to make you just have sympathy for him, but so you can understand what he said back in chapter 1 about how ‘as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth.’

“Now, that consolation is the important thing. Philippians1 says, ‘Is there no consolation?’ There’s a great verse back in Job where one of Job’s miserable comforters asks him, ‘Are the consolations of God too small for you?’ I mean, do you just have to whine all the time even after what God does for you? That’s a great question.

“Paul asks the Philippians something along that same line—‘If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies . . .’ When he says ‘if there be,’ he’s not saying ‘maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.’ He’s saying ‘if and they ARE’ as a challenge!

“Paul understands that his ministry, his life, as well as his ministry, was an example for you and me and that he’d been made an example of what God wants us to understand about the sufficiency of His grace so we can appreciate how we’ve been equipped to endure regardless of what goes on. That’s that thing in verse 6 about ‘which is effectual in the enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer.’

“You and I are equipped by God to endure. I had a conversation with a person this past week; a graduate of Moody Bible Institute here in Chicago, destined for the mission field, who got messed up in the world—got out in sin and some real vile stuff, ruined two families, all kind of things, and is head over heels in guilt.

“But the guilt is so bad that now the person considers himself worthless and therefore free to just go pell-mell on into it. And the statement was, ‘Well, if I’m going to go down in flames, I might as well go down big time!’

“I said, ‘Well, you know what you are—you’re like a race car heading for the brick wall. Put the pedal to the metal, man! Don’t bump it; hit it hard! Go on, because that’s what it is—it’s a brick wall!’

“Guilt doesn’t free you from anything. It just makes the hole deeper and darker. Just go off into the darkness. You know where the freedom and the liberty is? In Christ.

“This person said, ‘Well, God’s mad at me anyway, so just make Him REAL mad.’ I said, ‘God’s not mad at you.’ He said, ‘Well, I didn’t go to the mission field.’ I said, ‘Well, He’s probably RELIEVED about that!’ And He countered, ‘Well, I wasn’t living like this then,’ and I said, ‘No, what you were doing was preaching a false message, and He’d rather you be over here living like this than over there preaching that false message.’ ”

*****

Jordan went on about how “the sins of your flesh are just a waste of your time and that grieves the heart of God . . . that’s Ephesians 4. He says He’s grieved by that kind of living on your behalf.

“But don’t think you’re going to make God mad at you—He knew you were going to do that before the foundation of the world! He saved you, looked down through time, knew what was going to happen and it didn’t take Him by surprise.

“It’s just a waste of your time. He’s set you free from it, paid for it. You’re free to do better, live different; He’s equipped you with everything you need to do it. But, boy, if you go out and you preach a false gospel, well, that you see, God isn’t going to get mad at you and put you in hell and stuff, but there’s a little different attitude about that. There’s a curse—Galatians 1 talks about, ‘Let him be accursed.’ ”

*****

Recently, Jordan recalled going to the zoo and asking one of the animal keepers about the strange behavior of an impala caged behind a four-foot brick wall:

“I told the guy, ‘There’s something wrong with this impala,’ and he explained something very interesting about that little animal. It simply won’t jump somewhere unless it can see where it’s going to land.

“Now, if you’re going to live your life like that little impala, folks, only going by what’s in sight, what you can see, what you can feel, what you can touch . . . ‘If I can’t see it, feel it, touch it, figure it out, do it ahead’ . . . you’re going to have a very limited life.

“If you’re going to live purely by your circumstances, you’re going to have an intimidated life. But friend, if you’ll step out on faith in God’s Word and who God’s made you in Jesus Christ—and you’ll step out on faith in what God’s Word says our responsibility is as members of the Body of Christ—you can have a colossally unlimited life!

“I tell our men all the time: ‘We need to take the dare of faith!’ And by that, I’m not talking about some existentialist Kierkegaardian ‘leap into the dark.’ That isn’t what Kierkegaard meant by it either, but that’s what people call it.

“I’m talking about, ‘Let’s just stand on the truth of what God’s Word says,’ and base our life on that, and not live by circumstances, and by what we can see, and feel, and touch, but let’s live in the reality of what God’s Word says!

“I read one time about an elderly man where someone interviewing him in his late years asked, ‘You were young; now you’re old. What is it that has robbed your life of joy most? Is there some single thing?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I can tell you that straight off. The things that rob life of its joy are the things that never happen.’

“You know what worry and fear have in common? Neither one of them have happened yet! Don’t be afraid to take your stand on the truth of God’s Word and agree, ‘Regardless of what everyone else says, regardless of what it looks like out there, I’m gonna stand on what God’s Word says and I’m gonna let God’s Word be true and every man a liar.’ ”