Christianity alone offers hope to the human soul. “There is no other sufficient philosophical answer,” taught Francis Schaeffer. “It is not that this is the best answer to existence; it is the only answer.”
That message drew swarms of students to Francis and Edith Schaeffer’s Swiss home in the mid-1950s, and thus their L’Abri Fellowship was born. But in the early days, Edith worried about things like funding and strength and privacy.
I was sitting at my typewriter, feeling the heaviness that went with the uncertainties ahead. I propped my Bible up on the typewriter, and asked God to give me help and comfort. My reading took me to the book of Isaiah. Now I believe the Bible is, to the spiritual life of a Christian, what warm, fresh wheat bread is to the physical life—both nourishing and appetizing! There are also times when God speaks to some of His children in the very words of the Bible, written hundreds of years ago, yet seemingly written as a message for the situation of the moment.
Let me tell you what happened that day (as I read Isaiah 2:2–3). I reached for my pencil and wrote in the margin: “Jan ’55 promise … Yes, L’Abri.” For I had the tremendous surge of assurance that although this had another basic meaning, it was being used by God to tell me something. I did not feel that “all nations” were literally going to come to our home for help, but I did feel that it spoke of people from many different nations coming to a house that God would establish for the purpose of making His ways known to them. It seemed to me that God was putting His hand on my shoulder in a very real way and saying that there would be a work which would be His work, not ours.