God Is All You’ve Got
James Norton wrote to his parents on April 15, 1945, describing that day as the “second-happiest day of my life.” He was finally able to write home and to tell them about the happiest day of all: when he was liberated from a German POW camp. Norton had been wounded and captured four months earlier during the Battle of the Bulge and described his captivity as “living hell.” He also described an important change within himself as he confronted the possibility of dying:
Death has faced me many times in the past months and by the grace of my Lord and Savior I am here today to write this letter. I always considered myself a good Christian until I was captured, and then I learned what a fool I had been and what it really means to have faith and the power of prayer. I prayed day and nite, and these prayers were heard…497
This young soldier’s experience reflects a very real spiritual truth. Christians often experience a closer relationship to God during times of stress. Rick Warren described this phenomenon: “Your most profound and intimate experiences of worship will likely be in your darkest days when your heart is broken, when you feel abandoned, when you’re out of options, when the pain is great and you turn to God alone… You’ll never know that God is all you need until God is all you’ve got.”498 If we come closer to God in a stressful situation, we can be thankful that we have been so blessed. Our continuing challenge, however, is to seek God in our everyday activities, without waiting for the next crisis.
We despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God.
—2 Corinthians 1:89