Sermon Central
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What Are You Doing, Lord? Amazing Grace
Contributed by Sermon Central on Aug 31, 2011 (message contributor)
WHAT ARE YOU DOING, LORD? AMAZING GRACE
A couple days ago I was commuting to the church from Boissevain where we were camping this week, and heard an interview with a young woman named Kristen James Anderson, ironically on the last day of our free satellite radio. She came from a great family, went to church with them but was not yet saved. She was a very happy, popular, hopeful young lady. But in the course of 18 months in her last two years of high school she lost three friends, one to suicide, and she was raped. She never told anybody but she spiraled into depression. Her parents did what they could to get her help because they noticed she had changed, but they just didn't know what she was going through.
She was at a park one day, being out even though she was grounded. She didn't want to go home and deal with her parents, and she didn't really know how she would keep living this life that had turned around so suddenly. She heard a train coming and just in that moment decided she would lay on the tracks, and within seconds she described in great detail what happened as the train ran over her while she remained conscious.
Apparently when a train is going that fast it should suck you up under it and tear you to pieces. I know this is true because I have seen the police taking several garbage bags full of a person who did this at my old train station.
The girl said she felt the sucking initially, but then a force was pushing her down. After the train stopped, she looked around and saw her legs a few yards behind her and then started feeling the pain and sobbing uncontrollably for her mother. Within seconds she felt an amazing peace come over her and heard very vividly the song "Amazing Grace".
The paramedics finally got there but because of the weather couldn't get her air lifted out, so the authorities did something they never do by blocking off all the roads from where she was to the hospital. The police report said it took the ambulance 8 minutes on a route that normally would take 45.
When she was recovering in hospital the doctors said she lost 8 pints of blood and that most people would be dead after losing 5. Long story short, this experience humbled her, showed her that she still had a purpose in life, she came to have a relationship with Jesus, and she now has a powerful ministry to teens and their parents. She said that she didn't think she would ever have come to trust God if this hadn't happened and so is grateful for all of it.
If only we could see things from God's perspective in the midst of it all. When we are in a troublesome situation, if we could relax, step back and look at it as an opportunity in the service of the Lord, "Lord, what are you trying to accomplish here, how are you trying to change me?"
(From a sermon by Sean Harder, Can God Be Trusted? 8/5/2011)
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