In Wasserburg, a small peninsula on Lake Constance, there stands a small church close to the shore. Around the church is a cemetery. One of the congregational deaconesses was showing me this wonderful place, when suddenly she stopped and pointed down into the water before us. “Here,” she said, “my life was decided.” I looked down into the waves. Old gravestones were lying there on the bottom. When the water is clear, you can still read the inscriptions.
The deaconess continued, “When I was a young girl I was standing here once, looking down just as we are now. My eye fell upon on particular stone whose name was no longer readable. But I could still make out the dates, 1789-1821. And there it struck me that the hyphen between those two numbers was a whole human life. A mere hyphen, a dash, that’s all our life amounts to. It suddenly came to me what a responsibility we have to make something worthwhile out of this miserable little hyphen. That very moment I made my decision to place my whole life in the service of Christ, and thus I became a deaconess.”
We sat for some time there on the shore and it struck me also to see how great a miracle it is when God takes this little hyphen of our life and makes it into something “for the praise of his glory.”
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