Every fall, monarch butterflies in eastern North America head south, some of them flying up to 3,000 miles to the mountain oyamel forests of central Mexico. The Forest Service says the monarch is the only butterfly known to make a two-way migration like the birds. Here is the amazing part: the butterflies making that trip have never been to Mexico before. It takes three or four generations to make the trip back north, so not one of them has seen the place they are flying to. Yet they find it, tens of thousands clustering on a single tree. Scientists are still studying how they navigate. The God who guides a butterfly that weighs less than a gram can surely guide you home.
Andrew van der Bijl grew up poor in the Netherlands and lived through the 1944 famine, when he ate tulip bulbs to survive. After he gave his life to God, he began reaching believers behind the Iron Curtain. In 1955 he slipped away from a government tour of Poland to visit underground churches. In 1957 he made his first smuggling run into Yugoslavia, with Bibles hidden in his blue Volkswagen. Watching guards search the cars ahead, he prayed, “When you were on Earth, you made blind eyes see. Now, I pray, make seeing eyes blind.” His story became the 1967 book God’s Smuggler, and the world knew him as Brother Andrew. He died in 2022 at 94. God still opens doors that look locked tight.
Thomas Chisholm was born in a log cabin in Kentucky and never had much formal education. He was ordained a Methodist minister in 1903, but ill health cut his ministry short after one brief appointment. He ended up selling insurance in Vineland, New Jersey. No big pulpit, no fame. Yet he kept writing poems, more than 1,200 of them. He sent some to musician William Runyan, who said one poem appealed to him so much that he prayed earnestly over the tune. That poem was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Decades later, George Beverly Shea sang it in Britain in 1954 and it became a favorite. An ordinary life can still sing of an extraordinary God.
Adoniram and Ann Judson were American missionaries in Burma. In 1824, when war broke out with the British, Adoniram was arrested as a suspected spy and thrown into the death prison at Ava. He lay with his feet in three pairs of fetters on the damp ground. Ann pleaded with officials and brought food and clothing to the prisoners. Before their house was searched, she buried his precious manuscript of the Burmese New Testament under the house. Later, afraid it might be stolen or ruined by mold, they sewed it up in the form of a pillow covered with a mat. The Word of God has always been worth protecting, whatever it costs.
For years Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the suffering and poverty she saw outside the convent walls. In 1948 she got permission to leave the school and go work among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. She didn’t have any money. She simply trusted God to provide and started an open-air school for slum children. In 1950 she was allowed to start her own order, and its main job was to love and care for the people nobody else was willing to look after. You don’t need a big budget to start serving. You need eyes that see the hurting and the faith to take the first step toward them.
