The Night Margaret Stopped Running

Margaret Chen had tried everything. Three attorneys, two appeals, and eighteen months of fighting the wrongful foreclosure on her family's home in Decatur, Georgia. Every door slammed shut. Every phone call ended with "I'm sorry, there's nothing more we can do." On a Tuesday evening in March, she sat at her kitchen table with a stack of papers she could no longer read through her tears, her back literally against the wall of a house she was about to lose.

Her mother, eighty-three years old and sharp as ever, shuffled into the kitchen, set down two cups of tea, and said five words: "Baby, stop fighting. Start praying."

Margaret protested. She had been praying. But her mother shook her head. "No. You've been praying and scheming. Praying and calling lawyers. Praying and losing sleep. I'm asking you to just pray. Let the Almighty do what only He can do."

Margaret stopped running that night. She stopped making frantic calls. She was still and she waited.

Within eleven days, a federal housing investigator — one she had never contacted — opened a case against her lender. The foreclosure was reversed.

The Israelites stood at the Red Sea with chariots thundering behind them, and Moses spoke the hardest command frightened people will ever hear: "Stand firm. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still." Sometimes the bravest thing we do is stop running and let God move.