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Verse:“But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” —Acts 1:8
After the Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844, early Sabbath-keeping Adventists were still convinced that Jesus would come back soon; indeed, at any moment. In 1848, they held several Bible conferences to share the biblical doctrines they discovered from their careful study of Scripture with other former Millerites.
On November 18, 1848, at a conference held in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Ellen White received a short but very significant vision. “After coming out of vision, [she] said to [her] husband: ‘I have a message for you. You must begin to print a little paper and send it out to the people. Let it be small at first; but as the people read, they will send you means with which to print, and it will be a success from the first. From this small beginning it was shown to me to be like streams of light that went clear round the world.’” But how could the instructions described in this vision be implemented? James White had no financial resources to print even the first issue of the paper.
Furthermore, if Jesus was coming back soon, there was not enough time for the paper to go “clear round the world.” Nevertheless, by the following summer, James had determined to overcome the financial barrier by taking a job mowing a field of grass. But before he started, Ellen had another vision in which she saw that if he did so, he would be cut down by sickness because God wanted him to “write, write, write, and walk out by faith.”38 Finally, one July day, James brought home a thousand copies of the first paper from Middletown, Connecticut.
They were laid on the floor, and a little group of people knelt around them and prayed, asking God’s blessings on the tracts that would soon be mailed out to interested people. Donations began coming in to support the new publishing endeavor, which eventually encircled the whole globe.
The Adventist publishing work began because James White chose to trust God when the road ahead of him seemed quite uncertain.
Remember, following God’s leading may not make things easier for you, but faith in Him makes all things possible.