You Never Know - Gertrude Chambers

1884–1966

Gertrude Hobbs had a skill, a very specific skill. She was an expert at shorthand, recording up to 250 words per minute. At the time, that was a very accomplished speed. She aimed to be a professional stenographer, but after she married Oswald Chambers, she used her skill for a different purpose: recording her husband’s sermons and speeches.

You may be familiar with Oswald Chambers’s classic My Utmost for His Highest, one of the bestselling devotionals of all time. Millions of readers have spent their daily quiet time—or whatever quiet time they may have been able to steal from their hectic lives—reading his words and discovering new things about God.

Here’s something interesting about the book. Oswald Chambers died before it was written—sort of. The words and the thoughts were Oswald’s, but they weren’t originally intended to be a book. He may have intended to publish his thoughts eventually, but his untimely death at age forty-three due to complications from surgery prevented that. If it weren’t for Gertrude’s shorthand notes, everything her husband said would have been lost.

Gertrude spent years transcribing her husband’s words, and the culmination of her hard work was the 365 entries in My Utmost for His Highest. Imagine what she learned along the way, poring over her husband’s thoughts and words about the God they both loved. Imagine how close it must have made her feel to the man that she lost too early.

When Gertrude learned shorthand, she didn’t know how God would use her skills later in life. None of us knows how God will use our skills or talents. We might study something with the goal of getting a job and find that later, like Gertrude, we get to use what we learned for some sort of ministry.

Maybe your best skills seem like things God can’t use, but you never know what he has planned. As you go through your days, doing the things that you’re good at, take encouragement in knowing that at any moment God could use your abilities to achieve his purposes.

Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people.

Colossians 3:23