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All things are possible through God

Mark 10:26b-27

BY CHUCK LEGER

My father was born in Bell County, Ky., just before the Great Depression. Bell County was then, and remains today, one of the poorest counties in the country.
Many years after he left those rural Appalachian mountains, I returned there as a VISTA volunteer. I worked with a nonprofit organization that assisted the poorest of the poor with legal advocacy in a place where the poor were voiceless, seen but never heard, and marginalized.
 
The beauty of the mountains could not make up for the difficult poverty of the area. Health care was always lacking, good social services were hard to come by, education was inadequately funded and unemployment was high. But these people who had nothing did have one thing that touched me a great deal: faith in God and the Good News of the
resurrection.

My father had such a faith, and from his experience growing up he taught my siblings and me that truly, with God, all things are possible, and to always have faith that no
matter what happened in life, a faith in God would sustain us.

In my own life, I learned about how 'self' will run riot. I discovered that subordinating God's will to my own was never a good thing.

Somewhere along the line of my growing up, I had come to believe, as many others erroneously do, that through my own self-will and self determination I could do anything, and do it well. What I had forgotten about was my dad's teaching that it is only with and through God that all things are possible.

Have you ever heard the saying, 'If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans?' And so it was with me. In many ways, I had become the rich young man in the Scripture. I believed I was in total control of my destiny.

I was wrong. Instead of putting faith in God, I put my faith in tangibles, externals, extrinsics and fungibles ? things. 'Things' had replaced God and Christ as the center of my life.

Luckily, the Holy Spirit blows where it wills. It crossed my path, and my life was forever changed.

We have technical terms for that kind of grace, the kind that is with us, always reaching out for us, leading us down a better path. I call it 'God's grace' ? nothing we can do to earn it, a gift from God for the salvation of the world, something to be received.

In my case, I had to humble myself and accept that God was commissioning me to use the gifts God had given me to do justice, seek kindness and to walk humbly with God, as stated in Micah 6:8.

Returning to my roots, working in the mountains of Appalachia and later in the impoverished flat lands of Mississippi, I began to understand the deep faith of those who society had marginalized, the poor. I had to humble myself, make myself vulnerable to the needs of others, to learn again that faith in things did nothing for me except prevent me from knowing and loving God.

Our Adventure Gbwc_superusere poses a question in today's lesson: 'What would it mean to let it all go?' (Oct. 21, 2007) For me, it meant freedom, a new life, and an acceptance of God's grace. God's grace is meant for us all.

Rev. Chuck Leger, an ordained Elder in the Baltimore-Washington Conference, serves in extension ministry as the director of pastoral care at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda.