In church we often sing this old hymn whose lyrics say, “Here I raise my Ebenezer / Hither by Thy help I come”. I absolutely love that line, but I think many people miss the profound meaning of it because they don’t know what an Ebenezer is.
In 1 Samuel 7 the word Ebenezer (eh-beh-NEH-zer) is first used when God protects the Israelites from a nearby enemy (the Philistines) after Samuel made a sacrifice on behalf of his people. Though the enemy army was powerful and large, God allowed the Israelites to overwhelm them. Right after the Israelite victory, Samuel constructed a huge monument and placed it where the battle occurred. “He named [the monument] Ebenezer, which means “the stone of help”, for he said, ‘Up to this point the Lord has helped us!’” (v12)
In short, an Ebenezer is some kind of trail marker erected to memorialize an event where God helped his people and provided victory. The Ebenezer serves as a reminder to those God helped, as well as to those who are simply passing through.
This is a story of my Ebenezer.
On a warm night in July, I found myself in a quiet, dimly lit dorm room in Ankara, Turkey. I had the window propped open and somewhere in the streets below the final azan (call to prayer) was being sung out into the darkness. That night at 11:55, I submitted my application for the World Race.
A week later in the same dorm room, I was having a wrestling match with God. Though I was confident at the moment I pressed "submit", it didn't take long for doubt to work its way into my thoughts. The more I considered the situation, the more absurd it all seemed. There were so many reasons for me not to go in January. Lots of things would have to work out perfectly, and if they didn't… I simply couldn't go. I told God these things as if to say, "Look, I don't know if you thought about all this but I want you to know that I'm pretty sure this won't work so don’t make me say I told you so."
As I prayed really sloppy, weak prayers, the Lord kindly interrupted me and said, "Make a list, Emily. Write down all you need from me – everything I have to provide in order for you to go in January. Write a list and watch me provide."
In my journal I scribbled down the list. Some of it is shamefully trivial, but other things were serious: "I need a sub-leaser and/or someone to pay my rent" and "I need a job for the semester." In all, there were eleven bullet points – eleven things that God had to provide or else it wasn't going to work.
Three days after I wrote that list, I got an email about a job opening in Austin. A day later I’d applied for the job and set up an interview. The day I got a call back from the company offering me a job, I also got a call from AIM welcoming me to the World Race. The phone calls were minutes apart.
The job was just the first thing to be crossed off that list. One by one I scratched through something that had previously been a barrier blocking my way to leaving in January. The bricks in my Wall of Jericho were coming down and it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with God keeping his promises.
As the months passed, things continued to line up perfectly. But then, days before Training Camp and two months before graduation, I went to my advisor to apply to graduate. After doing a “degree audit”, my advisor turned to me and gave me the worst possible news. In the most irritatingly nonchalant way he said, “It looks like you’re one hour short of graduating in December.”
Naturally, I freaked out and assumed this was some kind of error, but he stared back at his computer and confirmed that I was in jeopardy of not graduating because one credit hour had slipped through the cracks somewhere. So I panicked and said something like, “Look you don’t understand. I have to graduate in December because I’m leaving the country in January to go be a missionary for a year. I’m going to hold orphans and eat rice and I ALREADY BOUGHT MY CHACOS!” My advisor dismissed my panic by telling me about one of his previous students who had done something seemingly similar. “She did something called ‘The World Race.’ Have you ever heard of it?” he asked. Okay wow, God, I thought. Okay wow.
I ended up having to take this special test to get the credit I needed to graduate, but because of Training camp I only had two days to learn an entire semester’s worth of material. I’ve never had so much riding on a single exam, nor have I ever been so sick with nerves. Anyway, I passed the test.
At training camp my teammate Jordynn said the Lord gave her a message for me: “Fall boldly, because the Lord wants to catch you boldly.”
From the moment I heard her speak those words, I knew they were straight from the mouth of God. He’d been trying to teach me about trusting him for months and mostly, I was learning my lesson. I was learning to trust in the Lord’s promises. But it turns out, I was only at the very edge of understanding what it meant to trust him.
When I came home from training camp, the last major thing on my list was finding a sub-leaser. At that point, I’d posted in every possible place and though plenty of people had responded, not a single person worked out. As the weeks passed, it seemed hopeless until eventually, it came time to buy a plane ticket to Launch.
I remember that night very well. I was sitting alone in my room feeling absolutely terrified at the idea of buying a one-way ticket out of Texas when I still didn’t have any secured way of paying my rent for six months. I knew it was the riskiest possible move to buy that ticket, but as I prayed about it I felt the Lord tell me, “Emily, you have to trust me with no backup plans. Fall boldly, remember?”
So, I bought the ticket. And it was honestly the most frightening thing to trust the Lord so completely.
I told myself that I’d wait until December 15th, two weeks before Launch, to find a sub-leaser. If I hadn’t found one by then, I’d try to raise the money to cover my rent – nearly $3,000.
A month before that deadline, I wrote in my journal:
choppy ocean and I keep getting salt water in my mouth. It burns.”
A few hours later, I was meditating on the scripture about Peter walking on water. I journaled about a vision I had while meditating:
After that revelation, I was no longer absolutely consumed by fear and worry. I trusted that it would all work out because it had to work out.
On December 15th I still had not found a sub-leaser. I trusted that God would some how provide, and I began looking into my options to raise the money. A friend and mentor from home referred me to a family he knew that might be able to help. I contacted the family and arranged to meet with them when I was back in town.
On the evening of December 23rd I met with a member of this family to discuss my trip and be honest about my immediate financial needs. I was so incredibly nervous before the meeting, mostly because if this didn’t work out then I really didn’t have a backup plan. It was sort of all-or-nothing, and that was a scary place to be two weeks before my scheduled departure.
The conversation lasted no more than ten minutes. I was prepared for the worst, as if to lessen the inevitable blow of disappointment, but I was a little caught off guard when, instead of a polite refusal to help me, the person sitting across from me said, “My family and I believe in the kind of work you’re doing, and we want to support you.”
Three days later I picked up a check for $2,850 – six months’ rent in full. Ten days before I was scheduled to leave home for a year, the Lord fulfilled the last of the promises he’d made to me almost EXACTLY five months before.
As I think back to that night in Turkey and the list I wrote that changed my life, there is simply not a doubt in my mind that the Lord is real.
You can be sure that I’ll carry that list with me around the world this year. In a moment of doubt or fear, I’ll pull it out and remind myself of what the Lord has done. When others need reassurance, I’ll raise my Ebenezer and offer undeniable evidence that the Lord is real, he is good, and he keeps his promises.
I don’t know what else to say except this: there are a lot of troubles in this world that we will have to face (John 16:33). Sometimes those troubles are caused by interference from Satan, but other times God himself puts troubles in our path. Don’t believe the lie that God doesn’t allow bad things to happen to his people. Sometimes the Lord allows troubles to occur because it’s only through those difficulties that we finally get out of the boat and run through the storm to his arms.
If and when you find yourself before a mountain and it seems impossible that you’ll ever get to the other side, I encourage you to raise your Ebenezer, stop telling God how big your mountain is, and start telling that mountain how big your God is.
