FROM THE PASTOR’S DESK:

I have a book title “100 Amazing Answers to Prayer.” I use it in my devotions, when I need to remain my self that God still answers prayer from ordinary people like you and me. The following story is from chapter Three “When God Does the Unexpected.”

The title is “The Mysterious Phone Booth.”

Same old, same old. Ken Gaub of Yakima, Washington, was at a crossroads in his Christian life and ministry. Part of a musical family group that had been giving concerts across the country, and he had been singing the same songs, giving the same message, providing the same pat answers wherever he went.

“I’ve been telling other people they can have answers, but do I have answers myself?” Gaub began to ask himself. “What business do I have preaching to people? Maybe I should quit this itinerant ministry, settle down, and take a permanent job. We travel around so much, I don’t know if even God knows where we are.”

So Ken Gaub prayed that God would give him an answer. He relates the sur-prising answer in his book “God’s God Your Number.”

One day Gaub’s group stopped in a town in Ohio en route to another concert. While his wife and others in the group went out for lunch, he stayed on the bus to be alone – to think and to pray.

Then he decided to get a Pepsi at a gas station down the street. As he walked there, he heard a phone ring. Alongside the gas station was a phone booth, and the phone continued ringing as Gaub approached. Because it kept on ringing, Gaub went into the booth, picked up the phone, and said, “Hello?”

He heard and operator say, “Person-to-person call for Ken Gaub.” He couldn’t believe it. He blurted out, “You’re crazy! That’s impossible.” His next though was that it was a Candid Camera gag. He looked around to check. Nothing nearby made him think it was a setup.

Then on the phone, he heard someone say, “I believe that’s he. I believe that’s he.” The operator asked again, “Well, is Ken Gaub there?”

Still dubious, Gaub responded slowly, “Yes, I’m Ken Gaub.”

In a moment he was talking to a woman who had just written a suicide note and whose life seemed hopeless. She explained that she had just been praying, begging God to show her a way out if he didn’t want her to commit suicide. Then she remembered seeing a Christian TV program. Someone named Ken Gaub had been speaking, and he seemed to have been speaking directly to her. If she could only contact him, maybe he would have some answers for her. In her mind she saw a string of numbers and quickly wrote them down. She though that maybe she was calling the West Coast office of Gaub’s group, and so she called person-to-person to make sure she would talk to Gaub himself. Instead, she was connected to a pay phone at an Ohio gas station.

It didn’t take much effort for Gaub to convince the woman that God had work-ed a miracle on her behalf, and soon he talked the woman out of her suicide plan. For the next several months, Ken and his wife stayed in contact with the woman, counseling her regularly until he knew that her suicidal thoughts were behind her.

Gaub is still amazed at the miracle. What is the odds, he wonders, that somebody would think up the number of a phone booth that he happened to be walking by? Could that be coincidence? Or was it an amazing answer to the prayers of both Ken Gaub and a distraught woman in a distant state?

I hope that this story can lift your spirit and we can keep believing that God is still the miracle-worker and will help you to move into a life of answered prayers.

Pastor Dora