There is a power to overcome.
When the world around us deals a blank hand, there is a constant that brings
us back into the game. When all is but lost and the doubt storms
of life rise with alarming intensity, there is an emotional ray of light
that pierces the darkness and shelters from the chaos. It was instituted
and demonstrated in peak form by the Master. It is the power to overcome.
The power is there for all.
I witnessed that power in a beautiful little Jamaican lady named Lillian
Sinclair in September of 1990. Never before nor after have I personally
seen that power brought to the forefront with such brilliance. When
I met her then she was 108 years old. Her senses of hearing and sight
were well past their better days. Her dreadfully bowed back bore
the testimony of her continuous years of hard labor. In the last
30 years of her life, her frail body had so confined her that she had not
been able to descend the treacherous hill that supported her two-room shack.
Her financial existence was reliant on what amounted to two American dollars
per week. And to my knowledge, her only surviving relatives who acknowledged
her existence were one grandson who checked on her weekly, and her mentally
insane daughter, well past her 80th birthday, whom she cared for herself.
She was the personification of the words Paul penned in 1 Corinthians 1:28
describing "the things that are not."
There were five of us who made the fifteen minute climb to the top that
day. Huddled tightly around her, we struggled for words to comfort
her soul. She sat on the side of her bed, her hands wrapped securely
around her tattered Bible. Though she could no longer read it without
great difficulty, she always kept it near. The best we could offer
her was the use of our healthy eyes to read for her. We asked her
what she would like to have read, but she just smiled and replied. "Anything
you'd like." And as we began to read from a randomly selected chapter
in the book of Psalms, Ms. Sinclair reflectively and softly started to
whisper every word by heart. We all stood silent in dumbfounded
awe at her wisdom and serenity. When the scripture had been read
she flashed an angelic smile, asked us to join hands and she offered a
prayer to God on our behalf. Tears were not hard to muster
in that tiny two-room house. Through this frail vessel of contentment,
our lives had been touched by the very Spirit of God. We had come
to lift her spirits. But she was already there. She knew of
the power. That precious God-given power to overcome.
Paul and Silas felt that power. They experienced its force in a cold
prison cell outside Macedonia. Seized. Dragged. Accused.
Stripped. Beaten. Shackled. Confined to the floor in
Satan's pit of despair. The crime - proclaiming Jesus Christ as the Son
of God. The reaction - "About midnight Paul and Silas were praying
and singing hymns to God." The result - more souls brought to Christ!
Out of the ashes of Satan's fire rose the triumph of God's power!
It had to be times like these that moved Paul to write the emboldened words
of 2 Corinthians 4:8-18:
It's there for you. Feel the power!