Woman of Prayer : Vonette
Bright
Christianity hasn't made a greater impact because people are not living what they profess, is the view of Vonette Bright, wife of William R. Bright, founder-president of Campus Crusade for Christ.
Certainly, Christians have problems, added the attractive speaker, author, mother of two sons, and Churchwoman of the Year for 1973. But if they will yield themselves to God, He will provide solutions. Those solutions, Vonette Zachary Bright has found, are in the Bible.
"His Word is positively packed with solutions," she said as we talked in the sunny den of the Bright's hillside home at the Arrowhead Springs world headquarters of Campus Crusade. "God's textbook to man is the Scriptures," continued Vonette. "As long as we follow those principles then we are going to find solutions."
To illustrate both her belief that the answers are in the Bible and that Christians can lead problem-solved lives if they practice what they profess, Vonette quoted 1 John 1:5-7 RSV: "This is the message we have heard from him
Page 65
and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin."
Vonette is the coordinator of the Great Commission Prayer Crusade, a strategy to unite Christians of America and the world in prayer. She also acts as official hostess for Campus Crusade, the noted evangelical organization whose headquarters are nestled in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California. Much of her time is spent speaking to church, civic, and women's groups. She speaks and writes about personal experiences that proclaim the reality of Christ and the practical authority of God's Word for today's world.
The key to overcoming, Vonette is convinced, is in choosing to trust the Lord rather than to find a solution in one's own strength. The latter route, in her own case, leads her to anxiety and frustration, Vonette confided.
"My disposition gets out of kilter. I'm robbed of my security and radiance in my walk with Christ."
GOD, I WILL TRUST YOU
When that happens, she tries to "really cast myself at the feet of the Lord and pray, 'God, I will trust You in this.' As I have placed my faith securely in Him, God has given me the solution, always with a biblical basis."
It has taken Vonette many years to come to that point. In her biography, For Such a Time as This (Fleming H. Revell Company) she tells of her romance with Bill Bright growing out of a high-school friendship in Coweta, Oklahoma, where the two grew up. At first, when she learned of Bill's dedication to Christ and his desire to serve the Lord through a specialized ministry, she resisted. Then, on the eve of her engagement to Bill, Vonette was brought
Page 66
to the place of making her own commitment to Christ through a long discussion with the late Henrietta Mears, director of Christian education at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church.
"Much to Bill's delight and relief, and to my surprise, I made my commitment to Jesus Christ, a commitment which I thought I had made as a little girl but one which had long since lost its meaning and relevance in my life," she wrote in the chapter, "Not Enough to Last a Lifetime."
Though the early months of their marriage were happy and Bill and Vonette were able to enjoy much time together, Bill became increasingly busy. He combined seminary training at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena with his profitable fancy food and Epicurean business. In the fall of 1951, Bill sold another business in which he was engaged and the Brights launched Campus Crusade for Christ at the University of California, Los Angeles campus. Vonette resigned a teaching job to help him work with the young women.
Soon there were still more demands on Vonette's time. Their first son Zachary was born. After Bradley, the second son, was born, Vonette's household responsibilities increased again. By now, hundreds of students attending various crusade meetings were crowding into the Bel Air home the Brights were sharing with Miss Mears. "Keeping the house clean, organizing refreshments and being a good hostess were time consuming," Vonette remembers, "as was being an attentive, available wife and mother."
HOMEMAKER'S BLAHS
Like many a modern-day housewife, Vonette soon came down with all the symptoms of homemaker's blahs: dishes, diapers, and dust. She seemed chained to all the tedious, annoying tasks. She was bored, even a little resentful.
Page 67
"After months of being filled with anxiety and frustration," Vonette wrote in her autobiography, "I began to wonder if I should seek professional counsel. As I harbored my discontent about the house and the work I had to do, my frustration and dissatisfaction mushroomed, engulfing other areas of my life. Soon my husband, my children, Miss Mears, and the students were as irritating to me as the house itself. I felt locked in a dull, monotonous, laborious existence without a key.
Still, Vonette told me as we sipped coffee on a warm August morning, she realized that decisions regarding marriage, children, and full- or part-time careers involve responsibility. And responsibility involves boring labor.
But all occupations have some boring routine, Vonette reasoned, so just escaping household chores wasn't the answer.
"The first thing I had to face was, where is the reality of the Christian life? And why am I resentful of doing the same jobs over and over again?"
Vonette came back to what she believes is the bedrock purpose of her life: to honor God and to bring glory to Him. She was then able to pray: "If I can honor You more, Lord, by doing dishes, laundering diapers, and cleaning this house, being totally in the background when I've been used to being in the foreground, then I will be willing — available — to do that."
Vonette flashed her ready smile. "I talked by the hour to myself and to the Lord telling Him that I was available to Him. I turned to the Scriptures where practical illustrations were given to me."
PRAYER, A VITAL, VITAL PART OF LIFE
Emphasizing that prayer has been a vital, vital part of her life, Vonette added, "I talk to God as my very best friend. I tell Him when I don't understand something and ask for His wisdom."
Page 68
God did not take away the housework. He changed Vonette's attitude. And that made all the difference, she says. The irritations began to melt away. Little by little Vonette came to understand the reality of the Christ-controlled, spirit-filled life. She learned not to look at circumstances but at making herself available to God. Setting her mind and affection on Christ, she gained the victory.
There were other bridges to cross on her spirited journey toward spiritual maturity. "One," Vonette said candidly, "was to accept my husband's great dreams and aspirations that seemed far too large for reality."
Anyone who knows Bill Bright and the scope of his Campus Crusade ministry, the grueling travel pace he sets for himself, and the long hours he devotes to fulfilling the Great Commission in this decade, understands that Vonette is married to a most unusual man.
"Here is a man who dared to trust God for great things and God has dared to bring them about," Vonette said in tribute to Bill. She says he has helped her more than anyone else in learning to trust God.
Ask Bill Bright if he has problems and he's likely to reply, "What problems?" Because of his faith and his personality, Bill doesn't consider that he has problems.
"Bill can honestly say he has no problems," Vonette feels, "because he so quickly hands problems over to God. 'It's God's responsibility to work this out,' he says. Then he relaxes or sleeps and goes on to cope with other things."
Actually, in her opinion, "Bill Bright probably has more problems than any man walking the face of the earth. When you have six thousand staff members in one hundred countries, you can't help but have problems."
By nature Bill is a carefree person, according to psychological tests he has taken. He is not bothered by anxieties. And he scored low in caring what other people
Page 69
think. Vonette sees him as being more concerned about pleasing God than about pressure from people.
Vonette, on the other hand, scored in the middle ranges both in anxiety level and in caring what others think.
Knowing this difference between them has helped Vonette understand why Bill can submit to God more quickly and completely than she can. "I admit I get almost impatient with him when he tells me, 'You're not trusting God with this,' " Vonette added: "I know that he's right and that's what gets to me. But it also encourages me that he can trust God so fast. I'm learning from him."
Summing up, she declared: "Bill has this unique, natural disposition, plus a unique confidence in God's readiness to cope, which is available to every one of us."
"How does a person cultivate this?" I asked.
GOD LEADS US TO HELP
"God leads us to help through a person, a book, a Scripture verse, a sermon, an idea," Vonette responded. "But you have to be receptive, you have to be willing to do what He wants you to do."
Vonette believes the purpose of problems is to cause us to trust God more and to learn that He is adequate. Each problem that is conquered through trust in God enables us to have more faith so that we can trust Him with the next problem.
"Faith really grows by adversity brought into our lives," Vonette said. "God has a perfect solution, a perfect plan, a way out. Sometimes it is revealed quickly, and sometimes there is a waiting period."
Vonette needed two years in order to reach the point where she was willing to trust God in a stubborn situation involving fear.
She was afraid she was going to die.
The gnawing anxiety plagued her, and she was embarrassed to seek help for many months. Though she admit-
Page 70
ted the fear was mostly psychosomatic, in her mind, it nevertheless was very real. Vonette had not spoken publicly about her persistent fear of death. She described it to me as being like a Satanic attack — a spiritual affliction.
The fear began one day when Vonette was half asleep, thinking about a project revising a Campus Crusade staff training manual Bill had asked her to do. The task was difficult, and it would take a year's time to complete. As she contemplated the work, in a half-conscious state, she felt as if a little voice inside her were saying, "You'll never have opportunities to do these things again. You aren't going to be here. You only have two years to live."
At that time, Vonette was frequently alone, working on the writing project, as well as caring for her two small children. Psychologically, she said, she was ripe for such a problem to work its way into her mind.
"I decided to live radiantly, be happy, and then check out of life with a strong witness."
Several things reenforced Vonette's conception that something was seriously wrong with her and that she would soon die. One was a scar from a benign mole which she had had removed from her shoulder several years before. Though there was no apparent physical cause for it, Vonette kept feeling a funny sensation where the mole had been. "I was sure I had cancer," she recalled, amused now at the notion.
When Vonette heard Dr. Henry Brandt, a well-known Christian psychologist, speak on psychosomatic illnesses and say that Christians do suffer from them, she decided to talk personally to Brandt about her fear of the mole.
He told her how sin or inconsistencies in a Christian's life can produce illnesses which are without medical explanation. So Vonette tried to tell herself that the sensation in her shoulder wasn't there and that it was all in her imagination.
She saw her doctor, who said it must be psychosomatic.
Page 71
"Beyond that, I was afraid to share the problem for fear I would be another example to be used by somebody — 'Pray for Vonette Bright; she's having spiritual problems!' "
Vonette now thinks her experience is rather common. She decided to share it in some detail with me in hopes that readers of this book would not feel they are strangely unique if they have similar fears about sickness or death.
HELP FROM THE BIBLE
Vonette did seek help from the Bible, but she did not see a counselor or share her anxieties with Bill. "You could call that pride, but I praise God we can depend on His Word and not other people, necessarily," she said in justification of her attitude. "To tell Bill would have been to burden him with a wife who was going to die."
Next Vonette went to Dr. Ralph Byron, a noted Christian surgeon at City of Hope Hospital in Duarte. He pronounced her fit as a fiddle. Then, when she told him about her premonition, Dr. Byron looked at her seriously and said: "Vonette, I don't believe that God does things like that. I don't believe He has told you you're going to die." (She had accepted the small interior voice as being from God.)
Vonette says she will always be grateful to Dr. Byron for not laughing at her when she told him about her fear.
Bill did laugh when she finally got up nerve to tell him nearly a year after the voice incident.
Bill said that he, too, had things like that happen to him all the time. "Vonette," he said, "this has to be an attack of the enemy to rob you of your security in Christ and to render you ineffective and keep you from being a strong witness."
Though this helped, her fears did not yet go away. And when Vonette lost her voice because of nodes on her vocal cords, she feared that for sure she had cancer of the throat.
Page 72
A strong antibiotic apparently cleared up the problem and the nodes disappeared just in time for Bill and Vonette to leave for a scheduled trip to Japan.
"I felt it would be my last trip," Vonette said, wrinkling her nose. "Isn't it funny how your mind can play tricks on you?"
She survived the trip, and on June 30, 1960, just two years after she first heard the inner voice, she and Bill were on another trip, this time by car across country.
By then Vonette was able to joke about it somewhat. She turned to Bill. "This is supposed to be the last day of my life, sweetie. Drive carefully. But if I get through this day, I'll never be plagued by fear again."
HOW TO HANDLE FEAR
Vonette says now that while that was not fully true, she has learned how to handle fear. And, because she senses others are bothered by fears, too, Vonette has developed a Scripture study on fear and how God has provided the answer.
"We need have no fear of someone who perfectly loves us," she said, citing 1 John 4:18.
Through her death-fearing experience Vonette has learned to say, when bothered by a worry: "God, is this impression from You? If it is, You keep me anxious about it and impress to take action. If it is not of You, then take it away.
"More often than not, God takes the anxiety away," she says.
There is a difference between being fearful and being concerned, however, Vonette pointed out. Concern will take action; fear leads to frustration, criticism, and lack of trust: "To worry to the point of being plagued about something is really sin," Vonette feels.
Page 73
Just as she did in overcoming the frustrations of housewife blahs, Vonette found the solution to fear in a changed attitude:
"The turning point was when I began to consider whether I was going to go through life fearing. And I prayed, 'God, if I can honor You more through my death than through my life, then I'm willing to die.' "
In the summer of 1976, God put the sincerity of that prayer to a tough test. Thirty-five women Campus Crusade leaders, including Vonette, were at a training retreat near Estes Park in the Rocky Mountains. In a sudden storm, the Big Thompson River overflowed its banks, flooding the entire canyon. The major disaster took the lives of seven Crusade women.
Vonette and eighteen of the girls became separated from the rest of the party during the confusion of evacuating the camp that stormy pitch-black night. In their search for higher ground, Vonette's party was taken to a vacant ranch building where they thought they would be safe for the rest of the night. They didn't know that only twenty yards away the raging Big Thompson was chafing at its banks.
The group bedded down on the floor, fitfully trying to sleep. "We trusted the rancher that we were in a safe place," recalled Vonette, remembering the nightmare of concern not only for their own safety but also for that of the rest who had been in the camp.
Vonette's party among them had one candle that wouldn't have burned long in the downpour and one flashlight. Still, one girl thought they ought to try to get out and find safer, higher ground. The girls turned to Vonette for leadership and guidance in the crisis.
"Let's pray that if we are in danger, God will keep us anxious," Vonette told them. "Let's pray that He will show us that we should get out of here and that He will give us a witness of the Spirit so we will know that's what
Page 74
He wants. And if not, that He will give us confidence that our lives are safe and that we can trust Him that we should stay right here."
Vonette explained to me that she was applying the "sound mind principle," based on 2 Timothy 1:7 (KJV): "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."
The rancher was familiar with the canyon and the river, she reasoned, he was reliable and rational, and he had guided them from where they had been in peril to safety thus far.
Vonette said she and the girls with her felt great peace and confidence in the decision not to leave the building during the night.
As dawn came, the women saw the destruction caused by the roaring flood waters and they carefully picked their way to higher ground by walking along a small ridge. They continued hiking to the crest of a mountain where, almost miraculously, they were met by Bill and a party of six or seven men who had been searching for them!
"If we recognize that God is a God of love, wisdom, sovereignty, and power then it's easy to be able to trust Him," Vonette nodded, reliving that traumatic night along the Big Thompson. "When we appropriate His power and draw from His resources then we can trust Him."
"But don't criticize yourself when you fail to be sitting on top of the world," she said, responding to my question about whether Christians should feel victorious all the time.
LIFE CONTROLLED BY GOD
Vonette added, "I believe Christians can live a life totally controlled by God. I see that kind of a walk with God in my husband's life and I'm getting there. This kind of abundant life is possible."
Page 75
Four verses in the sixth chapter of the Book of Romans are especially helpful to Vonette in making that concept a reality: Verse 6, "know"; 11, "reckon"; 13, "yield," and 16, "obey."
"We know that our old self was crucified with Him so that the sinful body might be destroyed and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. So you also must reckon yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?"
"According to God's Word we are to know that we are crucified, buried and raised with Christ," Vonette explained, "and by faith we are to reckon this to be true in our daily walk with Christ. As an act of the will we are to yield to God our members, our attitudes, our actions to God, and then obey what He tells us to do."
Vonette also finds trusting God easier when she dwells on His attributes: "You learn you can have great confidence in Him when you fill your mind with the attributes of God: Sovereignty, love, holiness, righteousness, faithfulness, trustworthiness."
In her counseling, Vonette invites people to trust the Holy Spirit in three areas: to remove from their lives and cleanse anything not pleasing to Him; to empower them to cope with situations in the way more honoring to God; and to anoint them and perform in and through them whatever He wants them to do.
Vonette and I continued talking and sharing for another twenty minutes, though other responsibilities awaited both of us. The Brights have been special friends of mine through the years, beginning with my student days at UCLA when Campus Crusade was in its infancy.
Page 76
"Is my brand of Christianity really worth sharing?" Vonette asked. Without waiting for an answer, she plunged on: "Man alive! One of the reasons why I'm so excited about sharing it is because it works. It's so practical. This is the only kind of life a person can live and really be above circumstances. It's the only way to find a total genuine peace of mind and solutions for the multitude of daily problems which face all of us."
