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Stories of Faith for Inspiration and Proof that God can be Trusted Completely

The following is a true story in my life and is dedicated to a bright young friend who also has a fear of math . . .

On entering state college, I had two GREAT fears–the fear of math and the fear of learning a foreign language, but my fear of math by far surpassed the other.  In high school, I did terrible in all my math classes.  Solving problems in front of the class on the blackboard was a constant source of embarrassment and humiliation. I had not been raised to think in terms of excelling academically; my father was a hard-working gray iron foundry man, and my mother was a secretary.

After accepting Jesus into my heart, I was convinced the Lord wanted me to go to college.  I attended two colleges before my final and third college.  At the first college I met my wonderful wife; a profound gift from God!  At the second college I met an exceptional brother in the Lord who became a lifelong friend.  But at my third college, I had to face my fears as I entered the sciences.

My major required that I take a quarter of advanced algebra/trigonometry and two quarters of calculus.  That was a terrifying thought to me, but after coming to know Jesus, my confidence was in the Him and not in myself.  Since I had not had math for so long, I was required to take two remedial (refresher) courses in algebra and trigonometry.  As I prayerfully and fearfully approached that first course, I was surprised to discover the algebraic equations I had to solve had become like little puzzles, little games to solve. And to my shock, I started having fun with math!

In both remedial courses, I received an “A,” but as so often happens in a life of faith, I hit a roadblock.  The next math course that counted towards my major was advanced algebra and trigonometry. The problem was that in my last remedial math course, we never got to the part on trigonometry, and 80 percent of this class was focused on advanced trigonometry, and I had also never taken it in high school!  After an incredible struggle of trying to catch up, I ended up with a “D” for the course, but I needed a “C” to go on to calculus for my major.  I prayed, “Lord, what do I do now?? I can’t go on any further with my major!”  The Lord seemed to quietly say to my heart, “Trust me.”

Later I went to the administration building to sign up for my classes for the next quarter.  I didn’t know what to do about my “D” and taking calculus.  The registrar signed me up for my other classes and then pulled out a copy of the students’ grades from the advanced algebra/trigonometry class.  Placing the paper on the table, she ran her finger down through the names, stopping at mine.  I felt sick and embarrassed. She turns to me and says, “Looks like a “C” to me” and entered my name for calculus!

This was back in the days before good copiers, and what she had was a copy of a copy of a copy, each worse than the last. I looked down at the copy and was astonished to see next to my name a crease from one of the copies right through my letter grade.  The “D” really did look like a “C”!  And before I could do anything, she handed me my approved class schedule and started helping the next person!  Well, that quarter I got a “C” in calculus.  In my second quarter of calculus, I got a “B.”  And who knows, had I taken a third quarter, I might have gotten an “A.”  (Chuckle.)

So where did the math lead me after college?  I ended up as an environmental chemist at our main environmental state laboratory for fourteen years.  Lots of math and statistics there.  Later, a friend of my wife asked me if I would teach a Business Math course at a local community college.  I did, and loved it!  After that, I studied and passed all five Amateur Radio licensing exams that involved a lot of electronic circuit and radio transmission calculations for both analog and digital.  And at my last job in our state division of air pollution control, I used a database of jet engine efficiencies from Paris, France, combined with the same mathematical model used by NASA in the space program to calculate our state’s first ever emission inventory for all the aircraft in our state.

Looking back on my life, I see that God has this way of taking our fears and weaknesses and AMAZING us . . . but only if we trust Him . . . and only if we let Him.

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.  Seek his will in all you do, and he will direct your paths.” –Proverbs 3:5-6  (NLT)

Copyright (c) 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols

The following is a true story . . .

After parking at the Canadian border office north of Fargo, North Dakota, my new bride of one week and I started digging out our driver’s licenses to show the border guards.   When my new bride turned her head and looked deeply into my eyes and sweetly said, “My purse! My PURSE!!  My purse has my driver’s license, and I must have left it in Wheeling, (West Virginia), at my parents house!!”  So much for sweet words!  Now we were in a panic!  In all the rush to leave on our honeymoon and drive West, she had forgotten her purse.

My classes started the next day at Canadian Bible College in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.  In those days there was no overnight delivery of anything, so it would take days to get her ID.  We were stuck, so I prayed, “Lord I’ll have to leave my new bride here while I drive on to school–Just kidding Lord!  Seriously Lord, we need to get across the border, both of us. Please help us, in Jesus name.”  The moment I quit praying, I felt like I was supposed to take our wedding album into the office with us.

It was not a busy border crossing and on entering the office, we only saw two officers.  I got out my driver‘s license, laid down our wedding album on the counter, and fearfully told the officer we needed to cross the border but we had a problem–my new wife had forgotten her ID.  The other officer asked about the pictures.  The next thing I know we’re all standing there looking at the album–I’m telling them wedding stories; they’re laughing, and the four of us are having a great old time!  When we finished with the pictures, they said we could go on across the border and wished us well with our new married life.  Praise you, Jesus!!

Before leaving school the year before I had made arrangements to rent a cute little basement apartment for the coming school  year.  I even had the landlady’s approval to bring a small pet since I‘m a critter person.  On arriving at the apartment, I introduced my new bride to the landlady and my furry little wedding present–an eleven-inch white, albino ferret.  She thought the ferret, named Goofus, looked adorable!  Much to our surprise and dismay, at the end of our first month in our cute little basement apartment, the landlady threw us out!  I felt really bad that this might give the school a bad name so went to talk to the Dean of Married Students and told him what happened.

The next day he called me in his office and said, “I know about your little pet, but she said it was six feet long!  She was afraid it might climb into her bedroom and eat her alive in the middle of the night!  We have had students renting from her for years and in general she sounded much different than she had in the past, so, don’t worry about it; I think she might be going through menopause.”  Whew! Another Praise the Lord!

We were told it was going to be very difficult to find another apartment with all the local colleges already in session.  Still, we prayed and with a lead from another married couple at the college, right off the bat found another basement apartment at the same price and twice the size!  The downside was it didn’t have any hot water, and the wall closets were so cold from the extended subzero weather, we kept our frozen meat and ice cream in with our jackets and boots.  But the upside was it was another answer to prayer and turned into a great basement apartment that was large enough to entertain friends.  We were very thankful and praised the Lord!

Before we got kicked out of our first apartment, my new bride started looking for a job.  This was crucial because we only had enough money for one month of school and rent.  She had graduated that spring with her Bachelor’s degree, so we thought that would be helpful in her finding a job.  She interviewed for a job as a stenographer at the office of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  That’s when we discovered she needed a work permit.  However, we were informed by the Canadian Immigration Office that in order to get a work permit, she would have to show that she had a job promised to her and that it was a job no other Canadian wanted!  What a hurdle; it looked like a total impossibility!

We brought this up as a prayer request at a church we had started attending.  Soon after a lady contacted my wife and said she had a position she was having trouble keeping filled.  She was the Director of Housekeeping at the Regina Inn and needed a housing keeping maid.  The Regina Inn was the premiere hotel in Saskatchewan and had very high standards, which explained the high turnover of maids.  My poor new bride was going from proudly receiving her college degree to cleaning toilets!

The Director of Housekeeping filled out the document we needed, and we took it to the immigration officer.  He was a big, burly rather loud gentleman who said he was in a rush for a lunch meeting but would look at our paperwork.  He sat down, glanced through it, signed it, told us to give it to his assistant, and left.  Next door in the assistant’s office, I handed her the signed paper; she glanced at it and got this weird look on her face.  She said, “I don’t know why he signed this giving you permission to work because this now makes him over quota!”  Nevertheless, she processed the papers and gave my new bride her work permit!!  Our hearts sang with praise, “Thank you, dear Jesus, for this permit we shouldn’t have!”
My new bride came home exhausted from her first day on the job.   It was a humbling experience, and though she was grateful for the job, started praying, “Lord, would it at all be possible to find a better job?”  The second day on the job, she was cleaning a toilet and suddenly puked in the toilet!  The Director of Housekeeping found out about her throwing up in the toilet and asked if she had any other skills, to which my new bride answered that she had been a switchboard operator in college.  The Housekeeping Director made a call, and it turned out there was an opening for a switchboard operator at the front desk!  Incredibly, another Praise the Lord!!!

During my time in college that year, my new bride happily worked the switchboard.  A few months later, she even got to be part of the staff welcoming the Prime Minister of Canada to the Regina Inn, and at another time, to meet George Beverly Shea, the key soloist for the Billy Graham Crusades.   By faith–we moved from a prayer . . . to a puke . . . to God’s blessing.  Praise the Lord!

“I will praise you, O Lord my God, with all my heart; I will glorify your name forever.” Psalm 86:12  (NIV)

Copyright © 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols

The following is a true story . . .

My friend screamed. Opening my eyes–I screamed!  My friend yanked the steering wheel to put our truck back on the road as we narrowly missed a telephone pole. We’d left late in the evening from Columbus, Ohio, in a small truck packed with used clothes for a mission in Cucumber Mountain, West Virginia.  It was 3 AM in the dark winding woods, and I’d fallen asleep at the wheel; my sleeping friend awoke just in the nick of time!  We were shaken, but thanked the Lord for keeping us safe!

Cucumber Mountain is a tiny hamlet buried in the bottom of the West Virginia mountains in McDowell County.  At that time, McDowell County was the poorest county in the country.  Most of the coal mines had shut down and there was little industry in the area.  Families that had been coal miners for several generations were now struggling on government support.  It was an isolated area where one had to drive down into Virginia and back up into West Virginia to get to the mission.

We finally arrived and slept in the truck till morning when the old mountain missionary came and beat on our truck to wake us.  “Take the clothes up to that small shed and pile them beside the other clothes on the racks, and then we’ll have breakfast.”  She sold the used clothes to the local folks for ten cents or a quarter.  While eating breakfast, I asked her, “Why do you sell the clothes when the folks are so poor?”  “Well, I used to give the clothes away, but folks didn’t take care of the clothes, and I’d see them lying in the yards or being used for rags, but I discovered if I sell the clothes to them, then the clothes become their property that they value, and they take care of them!”   She smiled and shoveled another fork of corn mush in her mouth.

This old mountain missionary had been a gentle, single woman who had moved to these mountains and had been helping folks in the name of Jesus for the last thirty laborious years.  Those years had turned her into a tough, no-nonsense-in-your-face, mountain woman with a great sense of humor who loved Jesus and the people she served.

On a later trip down to her mission, three of us brought another load of clothes.  She decided to take the three of us for a ride in her old four-wheel-drive Land Rover back into a “hollow,” an isolated section of the valley.  “I’m taking you boys to see a family I work with, and they just got electricity for the first time and are real proud of it!  They are touchy about strangers, though, because of the amount of “moonshine” made in these mountains, so stay with me and don’t go wandering off, or you might get shot!”  We learned later that there was no real law enforcement down there, and folks took care of things themselves.  The week before, a man was caught with another man’s wife and was chained to the back of a truck and drug around the mountains.

After driving over pitted mud roads and up a dry creek bed, we reach the house.  The first thing we noticed was their electricity.  They had one light bulb hanging from a wire over the front porch.  Nothing else in the home was powered by electricity–only the porch!  While she visited with the family, my friends and I stood out in the dirt-covered yard by the car.  Sitting on a pile of rocks, we saw two grimy little boys about five and eight years old.  Both had big wads of chewing tobacco bulging from their left cheeks and were spitting “tobaccie juice” on the rocks.  I walked over and whispered in the older boy’s ear, “You see my skinny friend over there; if you can spit some juice on his shoe, I’ll give you a quarter!”  With a grin, he went after my friend.  Five minutes later after chasing my friend around the yard, I paid up–the kid was a good shot!

That evening back at the mission, after washing my hands in the brown and black mineral stained sink, I asked the old mountain missionary why there was hardly any water pressure and barely enough water to wash my hands.  She said, “The well is at the bottom of the mountain, so by the time it gets up here, there isn’t much pressure.  Years back, a group of Mennonite men stopped in and built me a water storage tank.  The pump at the well would send a low volume of water up during the night and fill my storage tank; then all day long I had plenty of water and water pressure, but the plumbing went bad about six months ago, and what I have now is what I have–a trickle of water.”  Having done some plumbing in the past, I asked her if I could look at the problem.

Upon exposing the pipes, I saw the problem right off.  It would take a one-half inch cast iron tee, a union, an end cap, two ninety-degree elbows, and two six-inch pipes threaded on each end.  But we had a problem.  The three of us would be leaving early the next morning back to Columbus, Ohio.  The nearest town was War, and with the rugged roads, it would be impossible to get there before it closed.  So we were stuck.  But the old mountain missionary lady closed her eyes and prayed, “Lord!  You brought a man here to fix my plumbing, and he needs some parts.  Can you do something about that?  Thank you!”  She opened her eyes and smiled.

She said, “You know the little shed up the hill where you put them clothes you brought?  Well, years ago, a lady stopped by and made me some nice sturdy clothes racks out of plumbing parts.  Go up and see if there is anything you can use.”  I climbed up the hill, entered the shed, pulled back the tightly packed clothes on the rack and stared dumb-founded.  At the end of the half-inch cast iron pipe clothes rack was a tee, a union, an end cap, two ninety-degree elbows, and two six-inch short pipes threaded on each end!

I disassembled the clothes rack for the parts and a few hours later, this faithful old mountain missionary was thrilled because her water was working again.  And through her simple prayer, the three of us were blessed and humbled by the no-nonsense-in-your-face love of God.

“Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?” — James 2:5 NIV

Copyright © 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols