The Most Profound Proof

In my researching of apologetics books and materials, I often times have wondered
which argument makes the strongest case for proof of God to those who don't believe.
What evidence exists that can sway the most hardened mind.
In the midst of reading my books, I came across an example, that I found
so humbling it brought me to tears.

It's a story of the kind of life lived that serves as the best proof for God's existence.
Because the strongest testimony to God, in my opinion, is the amazing change
He brings about in the heart and life of the true believer.
So allow me to share with you this true story that touched my heart,
taken from the pages of The Life You've Always Wanted by John Ortberg.

"The state-run convalescent hospital is not a pleasant place.
It is large, understaffed, and overfilled with senile and helpless and lonely people
who are waiting to die.
On the brightest of days it seems dark inside and it smells of sickness
and stale urine. I went there once or twice a week for four years, but never
wanted to go there, and I always left with a sense of relief.
It is not the kind of place one gets used to.

On this particular day, I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before,
looking in vain for a few who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words
of encouragement. This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases,
strapped onto carts or into weelchairs and looking completely helpless.

As I neared the end of this hallway, I saw an old woman strapped up in a weelchair.
Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes
told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she
was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer.
There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed
her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have
been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth.
As a consequence, she drooled constantly.

I was told later that when new nurses arrived, the supervisor would send them to feed
this woman, thinking that if they could stand this sight they could stand anything in the
building. I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that
she had been here, bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years.
This was Mabel.

I don't know why I spoke to her---she looked less likely to respond than most
of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said.
'Here is a flower for you. Happy Mother's Day.'
She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it, and then she spoke.
Much to my suprise, her words, although somewhat garbled because of her
deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind.
She said, 'Thank you. It's lovely. But can I give it to someone else?
I can't see it, you know, I'm blind.'

I said, 'Of course,' and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place
where I thought I could find some alert patients.
I found one, and I stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said,
'Here, this is from Jesus.'

That was when it began to dawn on me that this was not an ordinary human being.
Later, I wheeled her back to her room, and learned more about her story.
She had grown up on a small farm that she managed with her mother until her
mother died. Then she ran the farm alone until 1950 when her blindness and sickness
sent her to the convalescent hospital.

For twenty-five years she got weaker and sicker, with constant headaches, backaches,
and stomachaches, and then the cancer came too.
Her three roomates were all human vegetables who screamed occasionally, but
never talked. They often soiled their bedclothes, and because the hospital was
understaffed, especially on Sundays when I usually visited, the stench was often
overpowering.

Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks, and I went to see her once
or twice a week for the next three years. Her first words to me were usually an offer
of hard candy from a tissue box near her bed.
Some days I would read to her from the Bible, and often when I would pause
she would continue reciting the passage from memory, word-for-word.

On other days, I would take a book of hymns and sing with her,
and she would know all the words of the old songs.
For Mabel, these were not merely exercises in memory.
She would often stop in mid-hymn and make a brief comment about lyrics
she considered particularly relevant to her own situation.
I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain except in the stress she placed
on certain lines in certain hymns.

It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was being helpful
to a sense of wonder, and I would go to her with a pen and paper to write down
the things she would say...

During one hectic week of final exams, I was frustrated because my mind seemed
to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about.
The question occurred to me "What does Mabel have to think about---hour after hour,
day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it's day or night?"
So I went to her and asked, 'Mabel, what do you think about when you lay here?'

And she said, 'I think about my Jesus.'
I sat there and thought for a moment about the difficulty, for me, of thinking
about Jesus for even five minutes, and I asked, 'What do you think about Jesus?'
She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote.

'I think about how good he's been to me. He's been awfully good to me in my life,
you know... I'm one of those kind who's mostly satisfied...
Lots of folks wouldn't care much for what I think. Lots of folks would think I'm
kind of old-fashioned. But I don't care. I'd rather have Jesus.
He's all the world to me.'

And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:

Jesus is all the world to me,
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day,
Without Him I would fall.
When I am sad, to Him I go,
No other can cheer me so.
When I am sad He makes me glad.
He's my friend.

This is not fiction. Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this.
I know. I knew her. How could she do it?
Seconds ticked by and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years
of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening---
and she lay there and sang hymns. How could she do it?

The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you and I don't have much of.
She had power. Lying there in that bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear,
unable to talk to anyone, she had incredible power."