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Francis A. Schaeffer: The Early Years

Instructor: Professor Jerram Barrs

Audio Transcription for Lesson 10: Move to Europe

Father, we thank You for this really beautiful weather. We thank You for being able to meet together now, and we thank You for the way You are challenging us as we study the lives of Francis and Edith Schaeffer. This is providing an opportunity for us to think about all sorts of things that challenge our own faithfulness and walk before You. We pray that You will be with us in this class. In Jesus' name. Amen.

We finished last time with the Schaeffers in Philadelphia. Edith and the children were staying at Francis' mother's home and having a difficult time there. During this time, Francis was traveling all over the United States, speaking for the American Council for Christian Churches. He was reporting on his time in Europe and speaking about what he was planning to do when they went to Europe in a few months time. They had five or six months there. As we think about this time in Philadelphia, the next point I want to make is to look at several instances of God's hand over their lives.

The first example is their meeting with C. Everett Koop, who was until very recently the Surgeon General of the United States. In the year that they went to Switzerland to live, during those months in Philadelphia, Priscilla, their eldest daughter (who was 10 then) was very sick. She was sick for months on end and the doctor they were going to see found nothing wrong with her at all. They kept taking her back. She did not get better, and the doctor insisted that the problem must be psychiatric. He thought she was anxious about moving to Switzerland even though she seemed delighted by the idea that they were moving to Switzerland. Finally he said that he was prepared to give one last test and if he found nothing at all then he would send her to see a psychiatrist. While she was having this last test in the hospital there in Philadelphia, a young doctor walked by and said, "That child is ill." And their own doctor replied, "No, I do not think so, I have not been able to find anything." And this young doctor said, "No, I am quite sure. There is no doubt about it; send her up to see me."

So, Priscilla was sent up to see this young doctor who turned out to be C. Everett Koop. What she had was some problem that he had been looking at and doing research on for some time. She had some particular problem with her appendix, which he then took out on the spot. It was an important moment in all their lives. It was the first time he came into their lives, and of course they got to know him much better later on. He came to stay with them in Switzerland with his family a few years later, and they became very good friends. Later on, of course, he worked on the film Whatever Happened to the Human Race. This was an important time in his life, too. He remarked afterward that it was the first time he had met Christians for whom God was real in their everyday life. It was his first contact with real Christianity. When he went to operate on Priscilla, Francis Schaeffer was out of town speaking somewhere. Francis sent a telegram, and Koop read it out. It was the first time that he had ever read out a telegram to a child before an operation, and the telegram said this, "Dear Priscilla, remember you are underneath the everlasting arms. Love, Daddy." Edith comments on how Koop responded. Koop's response to this was, "God is real to these people. Christianity really means something to them."

That was a little example of God's hand over their history in the way that at that moment in their lives through Priscilla's sickness and through what appeared to be a purely chance meeting in the hospital -- Koop was not on this case at all, he was just passing by -- that God brought the lives of these two people together. And He had so much more for them together in the future.

God had His hand over their lives, and He was taking care of them in ways they did not understand at the time. This is a theme that Edith keeps coming back to over and over again. That is why she chose the title Tapestry for the book. It was a word she had used many times before and that she was always using to describe our lives as individual Christians. Every day of our lives, God is weaving patterns into our existence, into our own personal history. And through our history, as we are taken to places, as we meet people whom we have not planned to meet, God is bringing people together. God is doing things. It is like Schaeffer's image of the escalator: you struggle over making a choice, you work hard at something, and then you look back afterward and you see that you have been on an escalator that has been moving all the time. God has really had His hand sovereignly over your history. This is of course a wonderfully comforting thing for all of us. If we have such a view it helps us to take what is happening in our lives day by day much more seriously. The people we meet, the people we talk to, and the events that happen to us are not just random events, just occurring by chance. God does have His hand over us, and He is able to tie things together to weave His pattern in our life. He is preparing us for the good works that Paul speaks about in Ephesians 2:10, "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." God has prepared beforehand good works for us to walk in, and He is able to work in our lives that way. This is really a wonderful example of that.

The second example of God's hand in their lives during this time was the choosing of the place where they would live in Switzerland. They had absolutely no idea where they were going to go. Edith had to go to the Swiss embassy to get this sorted out, because Francis was away so much at this time traveling. She found that as she was filling in the forms to make application to go and live in Switzerland that she had to name a place where they were going to go and live. And one conciliar official said, "Go to Geneva, that is the best place in Switzerland to live." And the other one said, "No, no, you must go to Lausanne. That is much nicer than Geneva. And so she said, "Ok." And she put down Lausanne on the form. And then the official who had suggested Lausanne said to her, "Listen, I have to fly myself to Switzerland very shortly to see my mother who is very ill, and I will find a place for you to stay. I will find a ponsione for you while I am there." This man had never met her before and knew really nothing about the Schaeffers apart from what she had told them in those moments.

But in fact he went and did that when he went back to Switzerland. You do not usually get this type of treatment, as you will know if you have ever been to embassies. The conciliar officials are often quite officious rather than helpful in this sort of way. But the place he chose was the place they were going to live for the next few months. After they moved to Switzerland they moved into the ponsione of Madame Turion at Rudia la forte at rosios lo san. So that was the second example of God's care of them during this time. They knew nothing about Switzerland really at all. They had no idea where they should live, but this was the place God had clearly prepared for them.

The third example of God's hand over them was the provision for them of what later came to be called the Praying Family. It is still called the Praying Family right up to this day. As they departed from the United States on the airline of New Amsterdam, they had a prayer meeting in their cabin before they left. At that prayer meeting were many of the people who became the core of the Praying Family years later. There were people from various parts of Pennsylvania who had been in the churches there, who had been praying for them, who appreciated their ministry, and who were committed to praying for them now as they left. There were people from Saint Louis and people from various moments of their lives who really treasured what they had given to them and were prepared now to pray for them as they went. And it was these people as well as members of their own family, like Edith's mother and father, to whom the family letter began to be sent. If you have seen the first volume of these letters, they start on August 9, 1948 when they arrived in Europe.

So, off they went to Europe. But I just wanted to give those examples of God's care for them as they went. All three of these things I mentioned were going to be very important in their lives later on. This group of people, the Praying Family, they regarded as having just as serious, just as important a part in the life of the work of L'Abri (which developed many years later) as they did. And they meant that very seriously. That is Edith's mentality, the mentality of L'Abri right up to this day: the people who stayed behind and who pray are just as important in the work as you yourself are as you go to communicate the Gospel to people. The Schaeffers really had that view; it was not just a pious statement for them. This was a view that Francis would mention over and over again. He emphasized the tremendous importance of these people who had committed themselves to prayer. So we see these three examples of God's care for them.

For the next little while they were on the move as a family, as they really had been already for several months since they had left Saint Louis. They had really very little of their own to make a home with. Edith suggests that in a way they were like a circus family for a while. She tried to do the best she could to give them some kind of home life, even though they were on the move. For the journey and then the next few months as they were moving around Europe, she made the girls matching outfits in quite bright colors so that they would be very easy to find and she would not lose them. I have lost one of my sons twice in European cities, once in Paris, France and once in Salzburg, Austria. And if they are not wearing something that stands out, it is very, very difficult to find a child who is lost in a big city.

But they arrived in Rotterdam, Netherlands at the very end of July, beginning of August in 1948. Edith stayed there with the girls in a small ponsione in Scheveningen for two months. Francis had to spend most of his time in Amsterdam, as they were preparing for the meeting of the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC). I suppose that was really the first formal meeting of the ICCC. You remember when he had come to Europe the year before that he had gone around everywhere encouraging the pastors he met and the people he met in various Christian organizations to take a stand with churches in America against the World Council of Churches, against the liberal theology that was so much a part of it. And now he was preparing for the first set of meetings in Amsterdam of this sort of infant ICCC. So he was living in Amsterdam and getting back to Scheveningen whenever he could to spend time with Edith and the children. And she was there carrying on. Edith was learning to type and so on and taking care of the girls. It was during this time that he was preparing for these meetings and attending these meetings in Amsterdam that he met someone else who would be tremendously important in their lives. He met Hans Rookmaaker, who at that time was a young art critic engaged to be married to Anna Marie "Anky" Huiter. They liked each other immediately and started to discuss the history of art, philosophy, and art over and over again. They became very good friends and formed a friendship, the four of them together, which of course lasts right up to this day, though both Hans and Francis Schaeffer are dead now. Anky Rookmaaker is still very much involved in the work of L'Abri in Holland. She and her husband, Hans, were its founders there.

Edith gives an interesting little example of how difficult life was in Holland in that time. With regard to the food (there was rationing still with everything), she says, "The ration of food per person per day was one square inch of meat." She points out that it was certainly not a cube of meat, it was flat. And you had no idea what kind of meat it was. But that was what you had, just that little bit of meat every day. Everything was rationed. You basically had potatoes and cabbage and this tiny little bit of meat, and that was it. She said that by the time the Americans came for the ICCC meeting and were complaining about the quality of their chicken and whatever else they were having in the hotels in Amsterdam, the Schaeffers felt completely sympathetic to the Dutch people, who were really offended by the Americans' complaints about the quality of the food in the hotels, which was of course far better than what anybody else was eating.

The other example of the rationing she mentions is that as Hans and Anky were preparing to get married, they just simply did not have enough rationing stamps to get sufficient towels, sheets, table cloths, and so on for their new home together. So Edith sent to the United States for some. Anky was so amazed by the size of the sheets, the generous cut of the cloth, that she cut lines off down the sides and turned them into table napkins because they were so much bigger than anything she had seen at that time in Holland.

This is just an illustration of how much Europe has changed since just after the second world war. It has just changed so dramatically. Holland is a tremendously prosperous country at this time, but it most certainly was not in the late 1940s. So there they were in Holland for a couple of months. They went for a short vacation in Brussels, Belgium and then Paris after their time in Holland and spent quite a bit of time at the Louvre looking at the wonderful exhibits in that museum. It is actually so enormous that you go there and after a few hours you just feel exhausted and you have not begun to see what is there. Edith recounts an example of how the whole family was sick because milk was so expensive in Paris that she bought some powered milk and mixed it up with water. This is a dreadful mistake even today in many parts of France, sadly, and they all became terribly sick.

They went from Paris to Lausanne, where they were going to settle. The conciliar official from the United States had his family come and meet them at the train station. And Madame Turion, the lady who ran the ponsione, came also. They lived there in Lausanne for several months, really for most of the next year. The time there was very difficult. They lived in two tiny little rooms. The girls had one little bedroom where there was hardly room to walk around the beds. They had another bedroom just the same size, which had to be their bedroom, their office, their Sunday school, their church, their living room, and everything else. The ponsione had mostly old people in it, all old people I think apart from themselves, people in their eighties and nineties. They were mostly old ladies and one old gentleman in his nineties. It was not like being at home at all, of course, in terms of the food they received and the baths -- they were allowed one bath a week in two inches of water.

That reminds me of my childhood, but again things have changed so dramatically. I can see Americans just grimacing at the thought. You have to recognize that some things are cultural that you do not realize as cultural but take for granted as a part of life. You may shower every day, but in many parts of the world that is simply not possible, as there is not the water available and it is not the practice of the people. But the Schaeffers found that very difficult having just come from the United States. The one redeeming feature was that the ponsione was in a really beautiful location. They had a lovely view. It was on the outskirts of the town, so they were right near the country and could easily go out for walks.

The children started going to a French-speaking school right away. They were thrown in the deep end to learn to speak French. That is really the best thing to do. Actually, if you are called to go and serve the Lord in some other country, the best thing to do often is to simply put your children straight into the school system. They will not sink; children have an amazing ability to adapt and learn. Although, Edith points out how Susan, their second daughter, said at one point, "I do not understand the other girls at school, and I do not understand the teacher, and now I cannot even understand myself." She was beginning to speak French, and she could not understand what she was saying.

Now, what were they doing there? This is really an amazing thing. The Schaeffers already had a substantial ministry in the United States, but they had really very little idea of what they were going to do in Europe. They were writing letters, and as I said last time they had been sent to "strengthen the things that remain." I do not know how you would feel if you were sent off to another country with that kind of mission, with such little definition of what you were to be doing. I am sure you would not find it easy, no one would. But they just got to work.

Francis wrote a lot of letters. He had a correspondence with all the people he had met the year before in 1947 when he had been there. Edith was taking dictation and typing those letters up. The family letters kept him in touch with people in the United States. Francis and Edith were both beginning to do some speaking in Switzerland, and they started Children for Christ classes. Edith started a class with several women whom she would teach to lead Children for Christ classes. The Schaeffers went to various other parts of Switzerland to encourage people to get Children for Christ classes going. Francis began to give lectures on church history and on where the church was going, particularly concerning the struggles it faced from neo-orthodoxy and the challenge of that. He spent some time traveling, and in fact as a family they spent some time traveling. They had to go back to Holland that fall for three weeks to talk to pastors there and to discuss the difficulties created by liberalism in the orthodoxy in the churches. And they also began to talk to individuals, which of course was what L'Abri became.

At that time they had no idea of the development of L'Abri at all; they simply began to talk to individuals and to pray for them. They started having a church service in that little apartment in Lausanne. As I said, their bedroom was their room for church. Edith writes this on page 290 of The Tapestry, "Fran felt very responsible to preach for us a series of sermons through the Bible, Old and New Testaments as faithfully as if he had a large congregation. We lined up four chairs on one side of our bed, and we had church. We prayed for others to join us and soon a little Irish lady from the ponsione came, as well as a divorcee from Boston with her two children whom we had met on the street. We had young people's meetings on Sunday nights, and the children took turns leading. They also planned Empire Builders meetings for Saturday afternoons, which consisted of bicycle rides and the big treat of a stop in a tea room for Ovaltine" (a chocolate drink). So, they started this little church service there. It is a very important thing, actually. Even if you are in a situation where you do not have a church to go to, no matter how few you are -- even if it is just your own family -- you should take God's Word seriously and its call to us to "not forsake our own assembling together" (Hebrews 10:25a). We should continue in teaching and fellowship and in prayer and, if possible, the breaking of bread. Thus the Schaeffers started having this little church service and took very seriously praying for people to come to that service and join them. And the people who joined them were incidental contacts, like this woman they met on the street.

They had a speaking vacation in January 1949 and their first exposure to skiing. They were invited to Adelboden in the German speaking parts of Switzerland, and they gave them a family holiday in return for Francis doing a Bible study each evening. At that place they had the chance to really communicate with quite a few people. They talked with many English speaking people who were there on skiing holidays, some who were Christians and some who were not Christians. They enjoyed that time in the mountains so much that when it came to the next summer, they were encouraged by people to try and find somewhere to live up in the mountains for a couple of months. So they went house hunting, or rather, Edith went house hunting, and she found the Chalet Bon Ecoy in Champery.

Champery is a very beautiful Swiss village. It is in a Roman Catholic canton on the slopes of the Alps. It is something like 4000 feet up. Huémoz [24:40] on the other side is between 3000 and 4000 feet. Huémoz is where L'Abri developed and is on the other side of the Rhone valley. This valley with the Rhone River runs down the bottom of this part of Switzerland, and the Alps come up on one side with Champery halfway up the mountains. And on the other side of the Rhone is a Protestant canton where Huémoz is and where the work of L'Abri developed.

But they found this little chalet in Champery through somebody they had met who recommended it. They were there for two months that summer, July and August. This was a wonderful time for their children. It was their first home really, their first home of their own after a year and a half, ever since they had left Saint Louis in February of the previous year. It was the first time they had really been able to have simply their mother's cooking and not somebody else's and to be by themselves as a family. That was a tremendous time for them. They were insistent on learning French, so during their summer there in that little chalet everybody had to speak French from breakfast until supper time.

They made some contacts during that summer there, which led to many other things later on. In a way the very first steps that led to what later began to be L'Abri were beginning to take place through the various individuals they met that summer. Priscilla ran into some girls in the village, some English girls who were there on a sort of formal holiday from their school in England. These girls were 14 to 18 years old, and she invited them around to the house. While they were there, they had a little Bible class for these girls. Most of them I do not think were Christians at all, but the Schaeffers invited them in and really started speaking about the Bible. They did a slide show and a talk for them. Francis was still doing some traveling during this time. While they were there he had to go back to Amsterdam for the Reformed Ecumenical Senate, which met that summer. And Edith was doing some traveling in Switzerland, helping develop Children for Christ classes.

After the summer they went back to Lausanne for two more months because they had already agreed to rent their rooms in the ponsione for those two months. But the children pleaded with them to stay, if possible, in the village because they had so much enjoyed having their own home, having a little more room, being out in the country, being able to run around, having more freedom, and just a life of their own. So they looked around and found a chalet that they could rent for one year. At the end of September or early October of that year, they moved into Chalet De La Fran for the next year, again in the village of Champery. That enabled them for the first time since they had arrived in Switzerland to get their luggage, their own furniture, books, china, and everything out of customs down in Lausanne. In Switzerland at that time you had to have a note from the canton in which you were going to live, saying that you had signed an agreement to rent a house for a year before you could get your things out of customs. You had to have a place to live, not just for a few months but for a whole year before you could get your things. That was a wonderful time for them, when they were finally able to get their own belongings. They were able to settle down in a house they could really begin to call their own.

During that time in Lausanne they started what you could call a "real" children's class. Edith had met already with women whom she was teaching to start classes, but a little boy on the street invited six of his friends to come along and have a real class. So they started a children's class right there in Lausanne. What they were teaching was the "Luke Lessons," which later became "Everybody Can Know." These lessons were just being prepared at that time with the flannel graphs for them.

There were all sorts of individuals who they had met in various places who they kept following up with. Edith mentions repeatedly an old lady, a German Baroness who had lost everything in the war and was so deaf they had to speak to her down in one of those huge old ear trumpets. They would go to visit her regularly and communicate with her about the Gospel. The Schaeffers had this tremendous commitment to really communicate to everybody God brought them in contact with about the Gospel. During that time Francis had to go to London as well. This was because the missionaries from the International Council of Churches in the United States were getting into problems in Kenya because they did not belong to the World Council of Churches. There was a real danger that they might be sent out of the country. He received a telegram from the United States, saying, "Please, fly to London, go to the Kenya house there, and try to speak to the officials on behalf of our missionaries in Kenya." And so he went to London to do that. While he was there, he met with a whole group of English children who came from all over the country to speak to him again. These were children whom he had addressed in a camp that previous winter in Switzerland. These children had so much appreciated his teaching that when he was in England for a couple of weeks they came by train from various parts of the country just to meet with him and talk with him again in London.

So they moved up to this village for this year in Champery, and they were still traveling. They would go off to Geneva, off to Paris, and off to Holland again for various meetings. And there in the village, of course, they began to meet local people and sought to communicate the Gospel to them. Thus other things began to develop that would shape the pattern of their work in the years to come. They were asked to have a Christmas Eve service in Champery for English speaking skiers who were there for the Christmas holiday that year. That was after they had been in the Chalet De La Fran for just two or three months. It turned out that there in the village of Champery was a little Protestant chapel. This is not common in Catholic parts of Switzerland. This chapel had been built by an English woman in 1916. She was obviously a real Christian who had prayed for that area and had longed for God's Word be communicated there, and so she had had this little chapel built. Edith mentions that they found out later that Frances Ridley Havergal had spent quite a bit of time in that village as well. She had lived there for a while and had written some of her best known hymns there in that village. Edith makes a very important point in The Tapestry when she writes about that. She says that God sometimes takes many years to answer the prayers of people. And when we go to a place and we find people beginning to be responsive to the Gospel, what may be taking place is the answer to someone's prayers that were prayed years before. You can be sure that Francis Havergal had really prayed for that village. This English lady who had built the chapel had prayed for that village. She had been there over 30 years before and built that chapel and had prayed that God would at some time use that to have His word communicated there. And it began to be as they had this Christmas service on Christmas Eve.

I think this is a very important point. We often feel that if we do not see immediate answers to our prayers that God has not heard them, that He is not going to answer them, or that they are not pleasing to Him. But we have no idea how God may answer those prayers years later.

Let me give you a really wonderful example of this. When we moved to the village of Gretton in England to start the work of L'Abri there in 1971, there was really no evangelical witness in that village at all. The Anglican church there was somewhat liberal, a little bit high church, and the Gospel was not preached at all. It was not alive. As far as we knew, there had been no evangelical there for we did not know how long. There was nobody in the village who was glad to see us there and delighted we were there to start communicating the Gospel. And it was not until many years later that a friend of ours, who had been involved with us in the work there, heard from someone who had been praying for our village. He was in a completely different part of England, and at church one Sunday he met an old lady. They began talking, and she found out he was from the village of Gretton. She said, "Oh, that is interesting! I used to live there until 1968. Every day since I have left I have prayed that God would do something there, that God would really communicate His Word. I have no idea what has happened, do you know if anything has happened in the village of Gretton? I prayed for that village all my life while I lived there, and ever since I moved away I pray for it every day."

This is just an amazing thing, because he was then able to tell her, "Well, yes, there is a branch of L'Abri there, this evangelical ministry. People are coming there from all over the world. People are becoming Christians there, people are being helped there, and there is an evangelical church that has started there that has a couple hundred people coming to it from that village and other villages around about." She was just absolutely overwhelmed to hear that. She had carried on praying faithfully with absolutely no idea whether God was going to answer her prayers.

God does answer prayers in ways we simply have no way of knowing. And when we meet somebody who is responsive to the Gospel, we should never think that this is simply because of what we are doing at that moment. It is very often because somebody else has been praying for that situation, for that person, for years and years and years. We will not find out how that tapestry fits together until we stand before the Lord, and I think that is going to be one of the most wonderful things to see. We will get to see how God has taken the prayers we have prayed, the prayers other people have prayed, and show us how He was able to use them in the unfolding of the building of His kingdom in history. I think this is a tremendously exiting thing, to see how God works in people's lives. And it is a tremendous challenge to us to keep on praying even when we do not see answers, for the answers may come after we have died. The village of Champery is an example, with the prayers of Francis Havergal 100 years before and the prayers of this English lady who built the chapel.

Now, again, all through this time the Schaeffers had no plans for what they were going to do. There were people back in the United States who thought they were crazy. "What are you doing? You have given up this ministry and there you have gone. You are just burying yourself." But there was this group of people, the Praying Family, who really had confidence that God was leading them and kept praying for them. And Edith was writing to them regularly. These long letters she wrote were going out every two or three months. It is really wonderful to read them from this volume, With Love, Edith. There you can see more detail even than what is in The Tapestry of what God was doing in their lives. But at this time still, they had no plans, they had no vision of what God was going to be doing through them, they had no thought of what God might be preparing them for. They were simply doing what God gave them to do. They were seeking to be faithful in communicating the Gospel to everyone He brought across their path -- whether these people were English skiers who happened to be there for a week or two in Champery, or whether they were people in the village who they were getting to know, or whether they were other individuals they had met in various places. And then they followed up faithfully with people like this old Baroness who they kept going to visit and becoming friends with.

Take people seriously, the people God brings into your life, rather than thinking, "Well, somewhere in the future God will have something for me to do. Maybe He will have some big thing down the road." What He asks us to do is to be faithful now. There is a really a important biblical principle. If we are faithful in the little things that God gives us to do today, He in His design will give us something bigger to be faithful with later on. But in a way there is never anything bigger. Because it is those people we meet today, those little things we have to do today, that are the important things. Life is actually made up of little things, all of life. There is not some big thing around the corner where the grass will be greener and where we will be more able to be used by God. What God asks us to do is to be faithful today, to pray that today He will be pleased to use us to build His kingdom. We are to pray today that we will be faithful in serving people, in loving them, in living the truth before them. We are to pray that He will bring us in contact with people He desires us to communicate with. Not at some point in the future when I am prepared, when my vision is worked out, or when I have the kind of ministry I ought to be doing, but now. That is what matters to God. This is a very important thing, I think.

Over and over again at L'Abri we had people coming to us who would have this wonderful vision of how they were going to be used by God in our work. And you know, they would sometimes write and say, "We are coming, and we hope to join you in your work." Or they would just turn up and say, "You know, we have heard about this work, and we want to come and join you. I have these gifts and those gifts, and God has called me to this and God has called me to that." But, while you have to take those things seriously, what we were really interested in was seeing people who were prepared to be faithful in the little things every day -- faithful in washing the dishes, faithful in talking to people who were lonely, faithful in showing integrity in everything they did, faithful in seeking to grow in their understanding of God's Word, and faithful in praying for people. All of the things nobody sees, those are the things that really matter. Those are the things in which God is actually preparing us for whatever He has for us to do in the future. Be faithful in the little things. It is little things like the loaves and fishes that God is able to multiply into something bigger. You know, it is a very profound thing; it is like the parable of the mustard seed, which is something really little that God is able to take and make into something big in His time and in His way. We have to have that biblical understanding that now is the moment that counts, today God is calling me to serve Him -- not tomorrow when He has created some "ideal" situation for me, but right here and now.

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