Welcome to today's edition of the Our Daily Bread Devotional.

Our reading is titled Mighty Warrior, and it was written by Alison Keita.

Deet Eamon was an ordinary, shy young woman in the Netherlands, in love, working, and enjoying time with family and friends,

when the Germans invaded in 1940. As Diet later wrote,

When there is danger on your doorstep, you want to act almost like an ostrich burying its head in the sand.

Yet Diet felt God calling her to resist the German oppressors,

which included risking her life to find hiding places for Jews and other pursued people.

This unassuming young woman became a warrior for God.

We find many stories in the Bible similar to Dietz,

stories of God using seemingly unlikely characters to serve him. For instance, when the angel of the Lord approached Gideon in Judges

6, he proclaimed, The Lord is with you, mighty warrior. Yet Gideon seemed anything but mighty.

He'd been secretly threshing weed away from the prying eyes of the Midianites who oppressively controlled Israel at the time. He was from the weakest

clan of Israel, Manessa, and the least in his family. He didn't feel up to God's calling, and

even requested several signs. Yet God used him to defeat the cruel Midianites.

God saw Gideon as mighty, and just as God was with and equipped Gideon, so God is with us, his dearly loved children, supplying all we need to live for and serve him in little and big ways.

Today's Our Daily Bread Devotional Scripture reading is from Judges chapter 6, verses 11 through

16.

The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ofra that belonged to Joash the Abiesrite,

where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a wine press to keep it from the Midianites. When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said,

The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.

Pardon me, my Lord, Gideon replied,

but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?

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