My Ebenezers: Part I Great Doubt, Great Existence

¹² Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, "Thus far has the LORD helped us." ¹³ So the Philistines were subdued and did not invade Israelite territory again. I Samuel 7:12

Many times in the Bible the Israelites where told to set up alters as reminders of what God had done for them. It's easy to forget where God has brought us and how he has been with us and worked on our behalf. So as a reminder for myself and hopefully an encouragement for those reading this, I thought that I would share a few instances that I look back on and can say "Thus far has the LORD helped me."

I attended a Bible College. I was very unsure of what I wanted to do in life so I was excited about the opportunity to be around focused people who were preparing for ministry that I gain wisdom from and insight into life. Much to my chagrin, most the students who attended the college where like me...unsure of what to do in life so thy were attending a Bible College to get some basic classes out of the way while learning Bible and also trying to figuring out what to do in life. I'm not going to go into detail, but the moral of the whole school was pretty low and I came to the point my Sophomore or Junior year that I was miserable because I tired of, among other things, Christianity as a legalistic way of living, I was tired of trying to be what I thought other people wanted me to be, I was tired of not feeling alive. The whole God thing the way I was living it out was making no practical sense in life.

One weekend in particular this came to a head. I went to lead music at a youth rally. As I stood on the stage prepping my equipment I thought, "I don't even know if God really exist, why am I doing this?" As I was thinking this one of my teammates was also making preparations for the youth rally. He was placing a sticker on the bottom of one of the chairs so that later on he could say, "Whoever is sitting on the chair with a sticker on the bottom gets a great prize!" He was walking around in the 4th or 5th row to my right looking for a chair to put the sticker on. I was ready to "quit" Christianity but out of my absolute desperation to know if God really existed I prayed, "Lord, if you are real, have my teammate but the sticker on the second chair in the second row on my left."

I don't remember how quickly it happened but pretty soon after my teammate went to the chairs on the left side, moved to the second row and plopped it right onto the bottom of the second chair. It was an answer to prayer...It was God saying, "Yeah, I exist!" When we got to the point in the rally where my teammate asked people to look under their chair I was watching the chair I had seen him put it under and it wasn't there anymore. My teammate had later moved it. I believe God had him put it under that chair because I desperately needed to know if there really was a God. In times of doubt this is one of the things I can point back to and say, "Yeah, God REALLY DOES exists. Thus far he has helped me."

This is one of my Ebenezer's.