February 7, 2005

[Rev. Doc]

A Little Pressure Goes A Long Way

"On that day a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria."
Acts 8:1

In 1832, French engineer Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps was traveling on the Mediterranean Sea. One of the passengers on the ship he was on came down with a contagious disease and the ship was quarantined. Lesseps became very frustrated. To help kill time he read the memoirs of Charles le Pere who had considered the feasibility of building a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. In 1869 the Suez Canal was completed, It was constructed following the design by and under the leadership of Lesseps.

It was during that quarantine thirty-seven years earlier that the plan for the Suez Canal was germinated and conceived by Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps. The entire world has reaped the benefit ever since.

Probably more often than we realize God uses adversity to help us grow, to motivate us to find creative solutions to life's problems, or to further his work. For example, the early Christians didn't fulfill Christ's commission to move out of Jerusalem with the gospel to the ends of the earth until the church faced persecution. They were forced to move to the ends of the earth.

Prayer: In times of pressure ask the Lord to help you see the spiritual lessons for life.

"Think a moment about a water-saturated sponge. If we push down with our finger even slightly, water runs out onto the table. We immediately know what fills the interior pockets of the sponge. The same is true of ourselves. We can tell what fills us on the inside by what comes out under pressure."
~Robert Schmidgall.