| In her early 20s, Lore Ferguson Wilbert attended a young adult conference that taught her to be a world changer. The room pulsed with fervor as the preacher exhorted the attendees to make “Send me!” their mantra.
“Passion was the proof of salvation, zeal was the evidence of our faith,” writes Wilbert. This wasn’t just the case at a singular conference. The phrase “don’t waste your life!” was a common refrain among Christians at the time. Believers often equated public acts like becoming a pastor or overseas missionary with true faithfulness.
“We all wanted to be used by God, but none of us wanted to fold up the chairs afterward,” Wilbert says.
Just a few years after that conference, Wilbert was utterly exhausted from trying so hard to be used by God. Burned out, sad, and angry, she eventually revisited that “Send me!” passage. She realized that Isaiah does not stand before God and spout off all of the credentials that make him worthy of doing great things. Instead, he sees the glory of God and responds with utter humility. “Woe to me,” he says, “I am ruined! ! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
Wilbert explains that when we come to the end of ourselves as Isaiah did, we are set free to realize that faithfulness to God was never supposed to be about our long list of achievements in God’s name. Instead, it’s about responding to the glory of God with gratitude and humility, through faithful acts of obedience both seen and unseen. |
