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

Laying her 98-year-old mother on the bed, she felt her go limp.  No pulse.  My most-favorite-mother-in-law had passed from my sister-in-law’s arms into the arms of Jesus.  No drama–she passed peacefully into His presence—at home in the cozy apartment her son-in-law had built especially for her.

The first time I met my wife’s very conservative parents, whose father was a pastor, was a bit of a jolt, not for me, but for them!  I looked like, and actually was, a bit of a “hippie,” with my long hair, torn jeans, flannel shirt, hiking boots, and a large bushy red beard.  They must have thought their conservative daughter had gone off her rocker!

After we were married, and over the years, I fell deeply in love with my wife’s parents and wonderful family.  When guys at the lab would talk about how meddling and annoying their mother-in-laws were, I’d brag about how great my mother-in-law was!  My wife’s parents were special.

Dad told me one time about when he and mother were doing missionary work back the 1940s in the wild backwoods of Kentucky.  It was a tough time for them because the main product in them hills was “Moonshine,” bootleg whisky.  The whisky boys were giving Dad a hard time because they were worried that if folks started giving their lives to Jesus, business would go down.

One day Dad drove up the dry old rocky river bed, which was the only road back then, to visit a family.  After the visitation, a group of rough mountain men came out of the woods and surrounded dad and his car.  Dad said he prayed for safety, didn’t say a word to the men, got in his car, drove through the men back down the river bed.  Later he was told by one of the men that they were so angry and on edge, that if Dad would have said anything to them, they would have stoned him to death.

Mother often told me about those days when in the backwoods how whenever they ran out of food, or milk and diapers for the babies, that the Lord would bring those things to their doorstep.  They didn’t have much money, but she said the Lord always took care of them.

One evening while sitting in the kitchen, long after I’d married into the family, Mother told me about losing her sixteen-year-old son.  He was an athlete who played football in high school.  He had a paper route, and was well-loved by the community.  One day he came home from school complaining about getting a stiff neck during typing class.  A few days later he was gone.

Mother told me his death nearly tore her heart out.  She grieved his loss; she grieved profoundly and for a long time.  Holding her hand to her forehead, she tightly closed her eyes and said to me, “It got so bad, that I was having trouble doing my duties at the church, and I really thought I was starting to lose my mind!”  “Then one night during prayer when I felt I was at the end of myself with grief, Jesus seemed to come to me and touch my mind, and took my grief, and I knew everything would be ok.  The next day I was fine and could function normally–Jesus really had taken my burden.  I still missed my son, but everything was ok from then on.”

Much later when Dad was in the hospital, Jesus again came to Mother and gave her a verse that made her realize that the Lord was going to take Dad home.  The next day, he, too, passed into the arms of Jesus.  And just a few days ago, unknown to my wife, the day before her mother passed away, the Lord also gave her a special verse to bring comfort.  Sitting in a restaurant for breakfast on the other side of the world in South East Asia, my wife who decided to read Ephesians during breakfast, was struck with the verse, “The Lord Himself is our peace.”  Throughout the day, she wondered why the Lord had so impressed this verse on her heart.  Jesus had prepared her for her mother’s death just as Jesus had prepared her mother for her dad’s death.  Both experienced peace straight from the heart of God.

Thinking back over the years, I recalled mother being funny in her own way.  She generally didn’t get jokes, couldn’t hold a tune, and in their younger years when dad started teaching her how to drive, on her first lesson she backed straight up into a chicken coop, sending the chickens and feathers flying everywhere, and that was the end of her driving lessons!  But she was awesome in a thousand other ways—in ways that count!

One time sitting at the large old farm table for dinner with my family and my in-laws that lived on a farm nearby I decided to tell a joke that was, well, a bit on the edge.  I figured mother wouldn’t get it, so I told the joke and watched everyone having a good laugh and my brother-in-law was laughing so hard I’d never seen him turn that red!  I was sitting there kind of proud of myself for launching a really funny joke past mother, when I hear her from the head of the table calling my name.  Mother said, “Can you explain that joke to me please?”  Then it was my turn to turn red!!

Another time we were visiting Mother and had brought along our dog Sassy, a miniature Doberman.  My family and I were sitting with Mother at the table for lunch during one of our many Christmas vacation visits.  Before eating, Mother would often remove her retainer from her mouth and put it in a napkin while she ate.  This time after doing that, she unknowingly knocked it to the floor.  One of my kids noticed and called my attention to it—just as we heard Sassy making some strange noises under the table.

When I looked under the table, I saw that Sassy had her paws tightly wrapped around the retainer licking off the yummy remains.  Sassy looked up at me, and I recognized her look and realized Sassy was getting ready to turn Mother’s retainer into a doggy chew!  I dove under the table and retrieved the retainer—gave it back to mother, who promptly popped it back into her mouth!

Mother was also a bit of word maven, and even in her nineties could, according to a tall and very smart friend of ours, “clean his clock,” in the word game Boggle.  That game along with Skip-bo kept her mind agile.  But more important than the games in keeping her mind agile were all the missionaries and pastors she prayed for every day!  She had a prayer manual that listed thousands of retired and current missionaries and pastors from around the world.  It became so worn and full of notes, you could hardly read it!   In 2006 we bought her a new one.

Now, 2012, as I thumb through that “new” one, it is also worn and tattered; I am simply amazed at the number of people she had prayed for including added notes of additional family members or special needs.  Mother was in the full sense of the phrase, a “Prayer Warrior.”  And oh how she prayed for all of her children and grandchildren, and great grandchildren–we will all miss her prayers profoundly!!  And she knew her Bible well—during evening devotions on our visits she would often finish quoting by memory what we had started reading from the Bible.

By now, you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with a wart and a casket.  Well, mother had expressed her wishes that she wanted an open-casket funeral.  A couple years back she had developed a rather unbecoming wart on her nose.   Now, near her death, it had become a very ugly wart.  Not that mother cared much . . .  at 98 she was past being concerned about being fashionable.

On the day of her passing, in the morning during breakfast my sister-in-law was looking at her wart thinking how bad it looked.  At lunchtime, she noticed the wart was gone!  And three hours later, so was mother!  It was as if Jesus came down and performed His own special surgery to prepare her for her open-casket funeral. What a cool final gesture of love from our Lord Jesus to Mother.

Mother will be greatly missed; she will be a tough act to follow, and we will all greatly miss her prayers.  But words cannot express the gratitude we have for the rich spiritual heritage she and Dad have left us.  Mother is now happy in heaven to be with her Jesus who she has been looking forward to seeing since she was a young girl.  And like my other brother-in-law said, “She will be rejoicing in heaven, but she will be walking–No driving, as Dad will see to that!”

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”  –Psalm 116:15

Copyright © 2012 by William D. (Nick) Nichols

Written in memory of my Most-Favorite-Mother-in-Law who went to be with Jesus on January 9, 2012.

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Another true story . . .

After arriving at the Fort Lauderdale Airport in Florida where my wife, our youngest daughter, and I were going to catch our flight to Costa Rica, we were greeted by our airline customer service agent who asked us our flight number and then redirected us to another line where we stood with about a hundred other folks staring at each other wondering what was going on.  There we heard the rumors about our flight being canceled due to the start up of a pilot strike. That flight was to take us to San Jose in Costa Rica, our church missions team meeting point, before being taken to our final destination in the village of Rio Cuarto near Nicaragua.  Knowing that we were on a schedule to meet the rest of our team, I said to my wife, “I wonder how the Lord is going to solve this problem?”  We stood in line and watched as folks started arguing at the ticket counter about their canceled flights.

While waiting our turn, I thought to myself about the time years back when my wife and I with our five-year-old twins and two-year-old son boarded a tightly packed subway train under Mexico City.  We wanted to take the kids to an animal park petting zoo we had heard about.  What we hadn’t heard about was that we would be passing through the notoriously worst area for pickpockets in all of Mexico!  (To be safe while traveling in Mexico, I had purchased a Harley Davidson wallet that zipped shut and was on a chain connected to my belt.)  We squished our way onto the subway.

I held the hands of our girls while my wife held our son with one hand and with her other hand hung onto my belt, so we wouldn’t get separated in the dense crowd.  The whirring whine of the electric engines started up and the subway took off, and all was calm for a few minutes.  Suddenly, I hear my wife yelling, “NO, NO!!!” Thinking someone is grabbing my wife, I turned around to grab whoever was grabbing her.  Turning, I saw the chain attached to my wallet pulled taunt straight out into the crowd!  In an instant, I see my wife grab the chain, give it a yank, and rip it right out of the pickpocket’s hands.  He had it timed so the subway train would be stopping in time for his escape–I saw him jump out the door and thought about going after him–then thought that would be stupid with me ending up lost from my family in a city of over 100 million.

We quickly checked my wallet, and the contents were safely zipped inside.  However, we soon discovered another pickpocket had gotten my passport that was in my front left pocket!!  We got off the subway and surfaced, knowing we needed to get to the embassy to report the theft.  Standing on the corner near the subway entrance, we had no idea where we were or where the embassy was, and we spoke little Spanish.  I prayed, “Lord, we are in a serious jam and need some help.  Amen!”  Moments later, we hear someone in perfect English behind us ask if we needed help!!  We turned around and saw this smiling couple.  We explained our situation and immediately they hailed a taxi for us to get to the embassy, negotiated with the driver in Spanish on a price, and told us not to give him a penny more!

The taxi driver was driving an old VW Beetle with the front passenger seat removed for easy access to the back seat.  When the taxi driver stepped out to open the door, I saw that he only had one eye!!   Well, that could present a serious problem because with only one eye, you can’t judge distance very well, and he was about to drive us through crazy congested traffic!!  I held my breath and got in.  He had some close calls but to our complete amazement didn’t hit another car all the way to the embassy.  I was impressed!

After getting to the embassy, we found out that getting the travel papers we needed in Mexico City were very expensive because of the bribes necessary to expedite the process.  While wondering what to do, we bumped into a guy named Jose, who was anxious to practice his English with the Americans.  After filling him in about our situation, he recommended that it would be easier and cheaper if we got our new travel papers in Oaxaca since we were headed there anyway.  However, traveling to Oaxaca, which was over 300 miles from Mexico City, without any travel papers was very risky.  Jose instructed me, “If the military pulls you over and takes you into their office, speak English very fast, use the word ‘attorney’ several times while you‘re talking, lay a big pile of pesos on the table, walk out, and don’t look back!”  Gee, that made me feel good about the trip to Oaxaca!

Praise the Lord, we made it into Oaxaca without being stopped.  After asking a bunch of folks including police officers for directions through hand gestures and a few Spanish words, we found the “Embassy” after climbing up a dirty, dark, narrow hallway of stairs above a copy shop!  I walked up to the lady at the desk, who very quickly became frustrated with my English because it was obvious to me that she knew absolutely no English!  I then tried the best I could to explain our predicament in Spanish as I frantically used my well-worn Spanish-English dictionary.  As her frustration furiously escalated, I saw that we had hit a wall and were at a dead end.  It was then I prayed, “Boy, Lord, I’m in deep crap now; we need some serious help here!”  Out of the blue, once again, in perfect English from behind us, a man says, “Hi, can I help you folks?”

He was a Wycliffe translator who had just stopped in the embassy for a minute to pick up a document he needed in order for him and his family to fly out of the country later that afternoon.  He spoke to her in perfect Spanish and got everything straightened out for us, and we quickly and cheaply got our travel papers.  How thankful we were to the Lord for his timely intervention!  While chatting with our new-found friend, he told us he and his family were flying out later on but wanted to know if we would like to join them for lunch before they left.  We gladly accepted, and he called his wife to let her know we were coming.  He then gave us directions to his house since he had another errand to run before heading home.

There was all kind of road construction going on–it looked like a war zone.  Parts of roads were missing, new sections were being laid down in other areas, detour signs were all over the place, and heavy equipment littered the landscape–so much so that I had to edge my van around them carefully.   After we made the first few turns, we were completely lost!!   It didn’t take us long to realize that there was no way we were going to be able to find their house and were bummed that we wouldn’t be meeting our translator’s family and have the opportunity to thank him again for his help.  “HONK, HONK, HOOOOOONK!!”  An old green Buick throwing up a dust cloud from the construction starts pulling up beside us while I’m driving, and in my side mirror, I see some lady waving her hand at us through her open window.  When she gets right next to us, she yells through my wife’s window, “Are you the folks from Ohio my husband invited to lunch?”  In stunned surprise, we nodded, “YES.”  She yelled, “Follow me!”  We followed the dust-storm all the way to her home.  She was on her way back from a store to get food for lunch and had spotted us!  The Lord had rescued us again!!

Returning from my reminiscing . . . back at the airport in Fort Lauderdale, we finally made it up to the ticket counter four hours later!  The airline gave us food vouchers for three meals, a voucher for an overnight stay at a nice hotel with a continental breakfast, a voucher for a taxi to take us to the Miami airport, and American Airline tickets for us to fly to Costa Rica the next day.  We had been very fortunate because later I found out that so many flights had been canceled due to the pilots’ strike that the airline had changed their procedure and started only giving folks their money back and a $100 airline voucher.

The next day when we got to the Miami Airport, we discovered the airline had NOT booked a flight for us with American Airlines but had only paid for our flight!  We were surprised when ticket agent said, “We can get the three of you on the last flight but you won’t be able to sit together.”  I was curious as to why.  She then volunteered, “Because there are only three seats left!”  My wife and daughter and I looked at each other and were not surprised that the Lord had gone before us once again! . . . as He had done so many times before.

“The Lord your God who goes before you will be fighting for you, and will do such wonders as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes;” –Deuteronomy 1:30

Copyright © 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols

PS:  Later when I told other folks about my wife yanking my wallet out of the hands of the pickpocket, we kidded about her “trolling for pickpockets.”

This is the conclusion to, Faith and My Fear of a Foreign Language . . .

Working her way down my row, she reached the person behind me–I was next.  Fear, fright, and flight all kicked in at once, and I jumped up out of my seat and ran to the back door.  “Ni Wei Li, where are you going?” called my professor.  I looked at her, stuck my finger to a tooth and told her I had a dentist appointment!  I lied.  Walking down the hall away from the classroom, I said, “Lord that was terrible; I’m never going back!!!”  And for two weeks I was in turmoil not wanting to go back but struggling with the feeling that that Lord wanted me there.  I went back on a Friday.  The professor had already figured out what had happened.  During that class, the professor comes over and stands beside me with her hand on my shoulder.  “Class, class, I want your attention!”  All the students stopped writing and looked up at the two of us.

“Class, class, I want your attention!”  All the students stopped writing and looked up at the two of us.  “Ni Wei Li here is afraid of what all of you think about his Chinese, so everyone, please be patient with Ni Wei Li.”   I was humiliated and felt stupid!  It was hard enough to come back to a college class after missing two weeks and then she did THAT to me!  In my heart I prayed, “Lord, that does it!  I’m not coming back for sure!!!!! No way, NEVER!!!”  The whole weekend I was in turmoil and again struggled with myself and the feeling that the Lord wanted me there taking Chinese.  I gave in; I was back in class on Monday and for the next few weeks, I had to work my rear off trying to catch up with the rest of the class.

As nothing short of a miracle from the Lord, I got through four quarters of Chinese.  I started debating if I should take a fifth quarter because I began feeling like I would never make it to China as a missionary.  Becoming a bit depressed over this, one day I found myself in a Christian bookstore.  As I was browsing the book racks, I saw a book about a pioneer missionary to China named Jonathan Goforth.  The book was titled, Goforth of China, so I purchased the book and read the story.  I had read a lot about China since I started my Chinese studies, and as far as missionaries went, Hudson Taylor who started the China Inland Mission had been my missionary hero to China.  But there were also things about Goforth’s life I could relate to, and he became my new missionary hero with Hudson Taylor close behind.  Both Goforth and Taylor were contemporaries working in different areas in China back during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I was inspired by Goforth’s life but was still struggling about taking more Chinese.  Around that time, my wife and I were invited to a wedding for one of her friend’s that was going to be held a few hours from where we lived.  On our arrival, we were told we would be staying overnight with some friends of theirs that were retired missionaries that had served some thirty years in Viet Nam.  The couple welcomed us and gave us an upstairs room for the night.  The wedding would be the next day.

I was sitting on the side of the bed getting ready for bed and got to staring at an old tintype photo on the top of a dresser.  I was thinking to myself, “That old lady looks really familiar.”  Then I started thinking, “She sure looks a lot like the picture I saw of Jonathan Goforth’s wife in his book.”  Over on a table I noticed a really old Bible–except it had Chinese on it!  I jumped up, ran over, grabbed the Bible, and opened the front cover.  Inside, hand written, was the name Jonathan Goforth!  I nearly fell over!  He had lost his first Chinese Bible during the Boxer Rebellion in China when he was attacked by a mob and left for dead.  It’s estimated that around the year 1889, several hundred missionaries and over 32,000 Chinese Christians were killed by the Boxers.  After he survived, a Bible society presented him with a new Chinese Bible, the one I was holding.

That was too much for me!!!!!  I yanked my clothes back on, ran down stairs, and started calling for the old missionaries.  The wife came out of their bedroom and asked if I was ok.  I blurted out, “What’s all that business about Jonathan Goforth upstairs in our room???”  She looked at me smiling and said, “I’m his great-granddaughter.”  That experience did a number on me, and I signed up for the fifth quarter of Chinese.  The following is so typical of God–to go beyond what we expect.  Not long after, a Bible publisher was hosting a banquet in our city, and the country of focus that year was China.  My wife’s uncle who was associated with the Bible publisher knew of our interest in China and had invited us to the banquet.  Sitting down at the banquet table, we said hi to her uncle and to the two men sitting with him.  Then her uncle turned to us and said, “I would like to introduce you to  Hudson Taylor III and Hudson Taylor IV.”   I had to fight back tears.

By the time I had gotten into my sixth quarter of Chinese, we had gone from three classes of thirty students each studying Chinese down to eight of us.  We were considered to be the next round of Chinese translators and every other week an officer from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would come in and pass out applications or other promotional literature.  One day my professor, the one who had humiliated me back in my first Chinese class, came to me.  She said, “Ni Wei Li, I want you to know that you have an above average ability to learn Chinese characters, even among the Chinese!”  By the eighth quarter, I was doing an independent study in Chinese, because at that time, I had taken all the Chinese the university offered.

Walking down the hall one day in the East Asian Language Department, I heard someone call my Chinese name.  Turning around, it was my Chinese professor for my advanced studies.  He was the head of the East Asian Language Department and had been responsible for the department receiving several national awards.  He also was an honorary chairman of the Taipei Institute of Linguistics in Taiwan.  He said, “Ni Wei Li, you are one of my “A” students, and if you want to go to the Taipei Institute of Linguistics, I will be happy to write you a letter of recommendation!”  All I could think as we parted was, “I’m humbled Lord!  How far you have brought me–from fearing a foreign language to embracing it!  You did it all because if I had had my way, I would have quit the day I ran out of the classroom.  Thank you, Lord; I now love Chinese characters and would have missed out on so much!!  Thank you, Jesus, for conquering the fear in my heart!  You knew what was best for me, and You knew it from the beginning.  Thank you.”

I will boast only in the LORD; let all who are discouraged take heart.  Come, let us tell of the LORD’s greatness; let us exalt his name together.  I prayed to the LORD, and he answered me, freeing me from all my fears.  Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces. Psalm 34:2-5 (NLT)

Copyright © 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols