Sermon Central
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Extraordinary Or Ordinary?
Contributed by Sermon Central on May 3, 2012 (message contributor)
EXTRAORDINARY OR ORDINARY?
God is not looking for extraordinary people. God is looking for ordinary people who will trust God in an extraordinary way.
Morton Kondracke is known as a no-nonsense, independent-thinking journalist who, in addition to writing, appears on shows like The McLaughlin Group and Fox's The Beltway Boys. His wife his life has been touched by Parkinson's, a disease that affects over a million Americans.
In an interview with Dick Staub, Kondracke describes how they first discovered the disease: She had beautiful handwriting, and she was writing a check and couldn't form the letter k right. I didn't appreciate that there was any difference. It looked fine to me. But she insisted that, no, there was something wrong. Later she had a tremor in the little finger of her right hand, and then her foot would sort of wobble on the brakes when she was driving.
She had been a counselor at the neurology center in Bethesda, Maryland, helping families with patients with chronic neurological diseases. She was given Symmetrel, which is a Parkinson's medicine by a doctor, and he didn't tell her what it was. But she called me up at work one day, totally distraught and hysterical in a way that I'd never heard Milly before. She said, "You have to come home right away."
There she was standing in the bedroom with this bottle in her hand. She said, "This is a Parkinson's medicine. It can't be Parkinson's. I've seen Parkinson's. It's a horrible disease. I won't be able to talk. I won't be able to walk. I won't be able to swallow. I won't be able to eat. You'll have to take me to the bathroom. I'll be totally dependent. You won't love me anymore. You'll leave me."
[I had to] convince her that I was not going to bug out. Apparently 50 percent of men whose wives have chronic illnesses split. Women tend to stick and men don't half the time. She couldn't be sure that I wasn't one of the wrong 50 percent in the beginning, but after a certain point she realized that I was there for the duration.
You just ask God's help every day, multiple times a day. I couldn't do this without God's help. I pray for help and strength and Milly's deliverance, all the time.
I simply could not do this without feeling that I was doing God's work in a small way. I've asked God innumerable times, you know, So what is my purpose here on Earth? hoping that he will add a new and grandiose dimension to this, which he never does. The message always comes back the same: Your job here is to take care of Milly.
("The Dick Staub Interview: Morton Kondracke" ChristianityToday.com, 8-13-02)
Most of the time God calls upon ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
(From a sermon by Monty Newton, Sacred Space, 8/29/2011)
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