clothes. The smell as she approached the cells was the first thing to hit her: she and Anna began to wretch as the stench of urine, stale sweat, blood, excrement, vomit, alcohol and rotting food assaulted them in the lamp-lit corridor. Next was the growing noise as they approached of crying, wailing, laughing and shouting. Worst of all was the sight of half-naked women who stared into Elizabeth’s face with hopeless eyes and with lice crawling in their eye-brows, hair and clothes. She went upstairs to the wards and clothed and cuddled the freezing cold babies and spoke comfortingly to their mothers. Back down in the cell, she and Anna, both devout Quakers, knelt down on the filthy straw. Some of the women knelt around them. Tears flowed as she began to commit the lives of these poor women and their ragged children to God’s care, probably the first time anyone had ever bothered to pray for them. Thus began her great life’s work. Through trials of her own she worked relentlessly to improve the conditions in Britain’s prisons.12
Take William Wilberforce. His progress from fashionable parliamentary socialite to slave trade abolitionist was, at first, a gradual one. Steadily, he had, through meeting key people, renewed his boyhood faith in Christ and latterly had become more and more apprised of the true horrors of the slave trade. Then, one night, something happened. While sitting and reading and filling his mind with information about the slave trade, he suddenly saw the gravity of the situation. Somehow, none of the statistical information had moved his heart until he happened upon the death rate among African slaves while en route to the West Indies. “From that moment,” recalled Wilberforce, “so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear, that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition. Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its Abolition.”13
Have you ears to hear, have you eyes to see, have you a heart ready and willing to feel and know the call of God to your life’s work? Read any statistics lately? Is there something you hate?
The town of Wittenberg was being descended on by hundreds of devout people for the feast of All Saints. All Saints was a mass, due to be held the following day, in which particular stress would be laid on praying for the departed. The year was 1517. Tetzel was an experienced vendor of Indulgences. These were written papal pardons issued in exchange for money. Tetzel entered a neighboring town in solemn procession and began his sermon:
Listen to the voices of your dear dead relatives and friends, beseeching you and saying, ‘Pity us, pity us. We are in dire torment from which you can redeem us for a pittance. . .’ Hear the father saying to his son, the mother to her daughter, ‘We bore you, nourished you, brought you up, left you our fortunes, and you are so cruel and hard that now you are not willing for so little so set us free. . .’ Remember that you are able to release them, for
‘As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from purgatory springs.’14
The truth, as the monk and lecturer Martin Luther knew full well, was that half the money was going straight into Albert of Brandenburg’s pockets to help pay off the debts he had accumulated through paying for the position of Bishop. The pope, in order to reimburse himself, issued a Bull of Indulgence with the intention that the other half of the money collected would go on the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica.
This kind of corruption was already well known to Luther and was an unbearable stench in his nostrils. The arrival of Tetzel and news of the ridiculous sermon he had preached to rouse the faithful, was the last straw. Luther only followed the normal procedure for opening a university debate: he nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg. Yet, the timing turned out to be crucial. A hundred years earlier and he might have been burned at the stake. Now, the people were ready, and the people were flocking to Wittenberg for All Saints Day. Luther couldn’t have known at the time that he was helping to usher in a new epoch, that, flawed and sinful though he was, he would be a midwife at the birth of the modern era.
It is the profoundest of mysteries that God can put in your heart a very strong objection to something that is so heartfelt that you are unable to speak of it without bursting into tears. Yet, confront me with the very same injustice and, while I see the wrongness of it, the tears do not flow. I haven’t got the call. You have. What will you do with it?
“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work” (John 4:34). It is only in doing what we were sent to do that there is food for our souls. Until we find it, we will be forever trying to fill that hunger with other things. Find your food.
Discussion:
1. Is there something good that you love doing so much that you forget the clock?
2. Is there something, not related to your personal comfort, that you feel so strongly about that you can’t talk about it without feeling like you want to cry?
3. What ordinary incidents have you experienced that have led to an extraordinary outcome?
4. Have you a story of some upsetting event that led to other events that were to be of great benefit to other people?
8. Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 51.
9. Kirkby, Nevertheless, 30.
10. González-Balado, Always the Poor, 16.
11. Pollock, John Wesley, 92.
12. The visit to Newgate is vividly told in: Hatton, Betsy, 160–163.
13. Pollock, Fistful of Heroes, 31. Altogether, so many died while waiting to disembark, while on board ship, and then while in their first year of work on the plantations that the total death rate was around 50%.
14. Bainton, Here I Stand, 59–60.
1:3. The Reluctant Warrior
When God Has His Way
The Bible is littered with them: Moses, Gideon, Jeremiah, Isaiah. They are people with greatness in them but who can’t see it. Gideon does not recognize the divine portrait of him: “mighty man of valor.” The reluctance of Moses goes far beyond modesty—he is insistent that he is absolutely not the man for the job. The refusal of the call takes place at the point where there is a jarring dissonance between heaven and earth, a clash of perspectives, a collision of narratives. Trouble is, there is one party to the argument that won’t back down. God has never been known to agree to disagree. He is not interested in managing such conflicts towards a mutually agreeable outcome. Or is he?
Perhaps the most celebrated biblical instance of a reluctant recipient of a heavenly summons is Moses. He stands out because he objects to God calling him, not with a single voicing of self-doubt (as in Jeremiah, for instance), but in a succession of five increasingly strident objections. The ludicrous act of trying five times to refuse God is so striking that many Old Testament scholars have put this multiple objection down to the existence of a number
