Brown Eyes and Other Non-Returnable Gifts

Just two years after the end of the Civil War in America, a little dark-haired, brown-eyed baby girl was born.  When she was a child, she prayed, she BEGGED God Almighty to give her blue eyes just like her little brother.  It appeared that God was silent, able but not willing to change her eyes from brown to blue.  In the meantime, God answered her prayer in a different way by changing her heart.  When she was twenty years old, God placed on her heart the calling to go as a missionary to China.  She put aside her blue-eyed prayers, and God led brown-eyed Amy Carmichael to India instead.

She served in India for the next 55 years, opening an orphanage and establishing a mission there, rescuing young girls from forced temple prostitution.  And in the process, God showed her the answer to her childhood prayer.  Dressed in native Indian dress, Amy was able to move freely among the people there, rescuing these enslaved girls, because she had brown eyes.  God's plans were revealed.  Her brown eyes were a gift after all.

And what is this gift that God has given me?
That which doesn't look like a gift at all,
this pain,
this wilderness,
this seemingly irrelevant ability?
I have no idea what this is,
     and why it has been given to me.
But what God reveals over time
                 are His divine purposes,
a multi-tool ready to solve problems,
a blessing in the process,
a glue that binds unrelated things together,
and perhaps this gift is not something for me at all
         but used in the lives of others,
all for the glory of His name.

Part of the gift is trusting Him in it.

His glory comes in all shapes and sizes
     whether I understand it or not.

Now we have received not the spirit of the world,
but the Spirit which is from God,
that we might understand
the gifts bestowed on us by God.

                          1 Corinthians 2.12

Let us not seek the "why"
            or even seek the gift itself,
but seek Him in it
and learn well how to use it
     that God would fulfill His purposes.

I will never fully know the extent of His gift
      until the other side.

And I am sure that
    He who began a good work in you
will bring it to completion
in the day of Jesus Christ.

                             Philippians 1.6