Kathleen Spencer's Journey

Kathleen Berg Spencer  · My Journey Through the Wilderness (to build someone’s faith) I’ve thought about how God calls us the “apple of his eye” in Zechariah 2:8. People who own orchards have to take the time to look over the trees, free them of insects and protect them from blight as any one of those things could destroy the fruit. When the apples are ready to be picked the owners want us to pick the choicest apples. When God says that we are the “apple of His eye” he is saying that we are his dearest treasure. He does everything that he can to protect us from the things that would destroy us or bring blight to us spiritually. We are still the “apple of God’s eye” even when we are going through very difficult times in our lives and it feels like God is boiling us, mashing us, and turning us into applesauce. Often we feel like we’ve been forsaken and left to wander on our own in the wilderness. I discovered though God never does evil to bring good that He does take the hard things that happen in our lives and use them to develop us into the people He wants us to be if we let him. Some years ago I began my own experience of 7 long years in the wilderness. We had served for 4 years at the Onondaga Indian Reservation Wesleyan Church and felt that God had released us. A few years before we had purchased 5 acres of land just north of Syracuse in Central Square and so we decided to build our dream house, and with the help of a friend and family and others the project began. From the beginning we were in big trouble as the guy who laid the foundation didn’t do the 30 degree angle correctly and so every piece of wood had to be measured individually before it could go up. And it rained every single day for weeks on end. As the days, weeks and months rolled by the men were out of energy and much of the promised help never came through. The 14ft camper we were living in without any water or electric hook-ups in a friend’s yard seemed to become smaller and smaller. Already discouraged, it took on new meaning when the word came one day that the GM plant in Syracuse was closing and moving out of Syracuse after Bill had been employed there for 17 years. We had a GM size Management salary home underway and now the bank didn’t even want to talk to us about money to finish the project. We did as much as we could and moved in. GM paid Bill’s way to go back to school and become an LPN but besides the construction loan, we had taxes to pay and other GM salary sized bills and no way to pay them. We had visions of the bank taking our house away and putting us out on the street. Stressed and discouraged we laid our bills in the middle of the table in front of us, and holding hands on top of them began to cry out to the Lord for His help. We told him that we did not understand how bankruptcy could be part of his plan for us, but if he didn’t do something immediately we would start the proceedings the next week. While we were praying the phone rang and a Christian man whom we barely knew from a different church denomination than ours, was on the other end of the phone. He said, “God put it on my heart to call you. What’s going on?” I explained a little bit of our situation and asked him to please pray for us. I did not tell him about the financial straits we were in. He asked if he and a friend could come to our house the next evening to visit with us. They came, and after 3 hours of encouraging us in the scripture and praying for us, the man who had initially called handed me a check and said, “Three days ago the Lord told me to give this to you. All I ask is that you give 10% of it to the work of the Lord. Please don’t open it until we leave.” When I opened it I discovered that he had written us a check for a thousand dollars! Several months later we bought a 1949 A.B Chase Baby Grand piano that was in perfect condition for $300 believing that God had put it in our path for use at a later time. Sure enough, the land taxes came due and we sold the piano for exactly what we owed, to pay our taxes. Our faith on relying on God to keep his promise to supply our needs was truly being put to the test and stretched and it was only going to get worse. (to be continued)