“Do the next thing”

 

I was only twenty-nine years old—young as well as immature—and now, decades later, I still remember that day as one of my darkest, most desperate days. (See Fighting to survive the next few minutes.)

 

Living at that isolated mission center in the middle of nowhere in Colombia was not what I pictured, not what I expected, and I was not prepared for living there.

 

While I hold no hard feelings for our mission organization, I now realize that our pre-field orientation course in Dallas was not sufficient when it came to cross-cultural living and the possibility of culture shock.

 

I had taken notes during our training and I‘d written in my journal that I appreciated the information but, in hindsight, I wish our instructors had emphasized a couple of critical points: (1) that we should expect to experience at least some culture shock, and (2) that we should reach out to others—our administrators, our neighbors—to help us through culture shock and to settle into our new lives in that foreign land.

 

But there I was on the mission field, unprepared and unraveled. Dumbfounded. A failure. Numb, broken, and weary to the core of my being. I don’t remember much about the rest of that afternoon.

 

And I felt terribly alone.

 

Yet, God was at work. Only later would I recognize that I’d hit bottom and that with God’s help and the prayers of family and friends back home (who had no way of knowing my circumstances), I was on the way back up, out of the desert wilderness and its despair.

 

The reality of that—of being on the upswing, of arising from the ashes—was out of my sight, out of my thoughts, out of my grasp. I didn’t realize that words of hope from Micah in the Old Testament were already working out in my life that afternoon: “My God will hear me. . . . When I fall, I will arise; when I am in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me” (Micah 7:7-8).

If I’d listened carefully, I could have heard God say, “I am holding you by your right hand—I, the Lord your God. And I say to you, ‘Do not be afraid. I am here to help you’” (Isaiah 41:13).

When we hit rock bottom, God whispers things like, “I love you. Together we’ll get through this. You have doubts and questions and worries, but trust Me. You don’t need to figure out everything this afternoon. Together with Me, you’ll survive this.”

God’s Word encourages us with assurances like Isaiah 40:29, “He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.”

 

The legendary missionary Elisabeth Elliot, newly widowed with a ten-month-old daughter, returned to Ecuador and the work she and her murdered, martyred husband, Jim, had originally started together. But she was overwhelmed with carrying out huge programs and projects underway. She said, “I had to learn to do all kinds of things, which I was not trained or prepared in any way to do.”

 

As she described it, she was trying to do the work of what I estimate to be four people! She wrote, “You can imagine how tempted I was to just plunk myself down and say, ‘There is no way I can do this.’ I wanted to sink into despair and helplessness. . . .”

 

Elisabeth continued: “I remembered a verse that God had given to me before I went to Ecuador in Isaiah 50:7: “The Lord God will help me; therefore, shall I not be confounded. Therefore, have I set my face like a flint and I know that I shall not be ashamed.”

Then Elisabeth had a brilliant insight: “Then I remembered that old Saxon legend, ‘Do the next thing.’”

Then she said something profound, “You don’t have to do the whole thing right this minute, do you?”

Elisabeth Elliot also said, “Sometimes life is so hard you can only do the next thing. Whatever that is just do the next thing. God will meet you there.”

And that afternoon God did meet me there in my little brick house in South America. He helped me do the next thing. He helped me keep breathing, performing like a robot, unpacking, organizing the house, and figuring out what to prepare for the family’s dinner that evening.

I will forever be grateful to Him for that.

Elisabeth asks you:

“Have you had the experience of feeling as if you’ve got far too many burdens to bear, far too many people to take care of, far too many things on your list to do? You just can’t possibly do it, and you get in a panic and you just want to sit down and collapse in a pile and feel sorry for yourself.

“Well, I’ve felt that way a good many times in my life,” Elisabeth writes, “and I go back over and over again to an old Saxon legend, which I’m told is carved in an old English parson somewhere by the sea. . . . The legend is ‘Do the next thing.’ And it’s spelled in what I suppose is Saxon spelling. . . . ‘DOE THE NEXT THYNGE.’”

Finally, Elisabeth asks: “What is the next thing for you to do?”