(Page 8 of 9) - But what happened after Chambers’s death begins to give us a glimpse of God’s mysterious purposes. Chambers’s wife, Gertrude -- whom he called Biddy -- was a prodigious note taker, who had learned Pitman shorthand as a teenager and who could write an amazing 250 words per minute, faster than most anyone talks. Biddy would sit in on her husband’s sermons and bible lessons and would transcribe everything that he was saying.
Shortly after her husband’s death someone asked Biddy if one of those sermons might be printed for the enlisted men to read. Biddy assented and the response was extraordinary. Very soon another of the sermons was printed; and then another and another. After she had returned to England with their daughter, Biddy continued to type out the seemingly endless shorthand notes of her husband’s many sermons that she had taken over the years. As the months and years passed the demand for them continued. Eventually someone approached Biddy with the idea of perhaps putting some of Oswald’s thoughts together in a devotional book, and in 1923 the first copies of My Utmost for His Highest were printed. That little book has been in continuous print for more than eighty years now, has sold many millions of copies, and is today still a best-seller read by people all over the globe. And Utmost is only the most famous and far-reaching example of how Chamber’s thoughts and teachings had reached the world, because before Biddy’s death in 1966 no less than forty books had been published from all of the notes she had taken of her husband’s talks and sermons.
It seems that through Chambers’s early death, and through his wife’s desire to keep his memory alive and his teachings available to those who had never heard him in person, his writings were scattered abroad and found an extraordinarily vast readership, something that likely would have never happened had Chambers lived and continued to preach and teach. More people have been affected and blessed by what he taught on those hot mornings in the desert near Cairo than if he had preached and taught there for ten or twenty or even a hundred lifetimes. The more I thought about this unanticipated and astounding multiplication of Chambers’ sermons the more I couldn’t help wondering whether God didn’t have something similar in mind with David, even before I knew of the remarkable similarities between them. I began to wonder afresh at the old saying that God works in mysterious ways. * *
I couldn’t help feeling that already a part of God’s mysterious ways involved Jim speaking at David’s funeral. Who could have thought, a few weeks before, that the deep and extraordinary faith that David had would be broadcast like this, to an untold audience watching on television and to the assembled throng in that great sacred space on Fifth Avenue? Who could have imagined that my friend Jim would have the singular privelege of telling the world of the central most important fact of David’s life, that he had had a lifechanging experience with the living God, and had in his last days been gloriously transformed and filled with hope and joy?
And perhaps most remarkable of all, who could have known that we all would hear these things not just from Jim, but from David himself, when Jim read David’s last email? We would hear these things that morning in David’s own words, which he had written alone to his dear wife in his last day on earth, in that battlezone where he had become so famous. We would hear that the most important thing in life was his relationship with God and with his family, and that he aspired, above all things, to give “every ounce of his being” serving his family and Jesus. This was more than any of us might have hoped for and we who knew him and loved him could hardly contain ourselves in thinking of God’s faithfulness to us all, in the midst of our doubts. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next Page › |
