The Questions on the Bus Go Round and Round

"If you ask God for something, He will give it to you, won't He?" the lady on the bus asked, looking eagerly at me, sure that I was going to say yes.
This was another of those church bus situations where it would be so comfortable to just say yes,
just say the answer they are expecting.
After all, Jesus said, "Ask and it will be given to you," right?

When I didn't say yes right away, the lady looked at me a little more anxiously.
I turned around in my seat and said gently,
"Well, God will give us what we ask if it is His will, but sometimes, He knows that what we ask is not the best thing for us."
The shock on her face was obvious.
My answer had not been what she expected.
"Let me tell you a story," I went on quickly, and proceeded to tell a story on the bus that I have told over and over because it touches hearts everywhere.

 It's about a little girl who wanted blue eyes like her mother had, and she was just sure that if she prayed and asked God for blue eyes, she would wake up in the morning with blue eyes.
But when she got up the next morning and looked in the mirror, what do you suppose she saw?
Brown eyes that filled with tears!
God had not answered her prayer!
But then the little girl heard a voice, and it said, "Isn't 'No' an answer?"

No was an answer when her mother or father said it.
No was an answer if God said it, too. God had answered her prayer. He had just said no.
Years later, the little girl became the missionary Amy Carmichael in India.
And one day she was dressing in an Indian sari and staining her face with coffee so that she could enter, disguised as an Indian, into an idol temple unnoticed in order to learn more about how to rescue child slaves.
A lady helping her said, "It's such a good thing that you have brown eyes and not blue!
If you had blue eyes, you would never get into the temple because they would know right away that you are English!"

Right then, Amy remembered her prayer as a little girl and how disappointed she had been that God had seemed to not answer.
In fact, He had answered, but in His own beautiful way. 

His answer had been, "No."

God had a perfect plan for her brown eyes, and because of them, she could slip into the Indian temples and learn ways of rescuing children.

****

The lady on the bus was very quiet. 

I believe sometimes a story explains a concept so much better than explaining theology.

This story is from a story series about Amy Carmichael with visuals, which I bought from CEF Press about 30 years ago and have used over and over, as you can see in the pictures above.

In Ukraine, when I told this story one Sunday morning to a large church, it seemed as if the whole congregation melted into tears. In Ukraine, it seemed as if the answer they received most of the time from God was, "No."

Everywhere I looked, people were crying.

The second time I told this story to another church, a young woman came to me in tears afterward, thanking me fervently.

I have told it to children in North Caicos and to native American children in South Dakota.

I recommend this story to anyone working with children.

But it is a sweet and gentle story for adults, too, on a bus on a Sunday morning in Denver.