Boyhood Lessons of Trust in God

What can be firmer as the basis of a boy’s intelligent faith in God than the explicit promises of his Father in heaven assured to him by a godly mother, and confirmed by her testimony as to that Father’s readiness to make good his word in our day and sphere? Such a basis was given to me in my boyhood days by my mother, and that basis has not failed me from then until now.

Bible promises and Bible stories were told to me by my faithful and faith-filled mother before I had read them for myself; and they seemed all the truer to me because she said they were true, and surely I could never question or doubt my mother or my mother’s words! Then she added to the sure promises of God her

confident testimony of much that she had 5

Ullustrative Answers to Prayer

known of God’s willingness to hear and to answer the prayers of his children in their need and their faith, and she enjoined it on me to trust God ever accordingly. Thus I came to know and to trust Him who, in our dependence and need, is ready to minister to his children “as one whom his mother comforteth.” One incident which my mother recited to me out of the experience of a neighbor of hers, impressed indelibly upon my mind the truth that God is, in our day, the God of the widow and the fatherless, as ready to hear and to answer faith-filled prayers as he was in the days of Elijah and Elisha.

My boyhood’s home was on the New England seacoast, at a point where Long Island Sound opens into the Atlantic Ocean. Seventy-five or a hundred years ago there was, in a New England village, no such wide distance between the rich and the poor as nowadays there is in many a prosperous community. Few families had

household servants. Servants, indeed, were 6

Bovbood Lessons of Trust in God

not then known there as a class. Families who were “better off” than their neighbors were accustomed to call on the women and girls of those neighbors to act as “help” in household work, such as washing and baking and house-cleaning and sewing and nursing. Men and boys who were not in any particular trade, or who were not on the water as sailors or coasters, were accustomed to do service for their well-to-do neighbors as “help” in planting and harvesting and wood-chopping, and other odd jobs. Thus, while most were enabled to get along day by day moderately well, there was at times a family where a widow and her fatherless children, or others, would, through special circumstances, be pressed for means of support beyond the knowledge of their neighbors.

Such a family lived not far from my mother and grandmother, in a house often pointed out to me as I heard the story afterward. The mother and her two children served and trusted God, and did the 7

Ulustrative Answers to Prayer

best they could for themselves, as they found opportunity, in doing such work as their neighbors could furnish them. But at one time the mother found herself in extremity. Asa stormy night shut in she had not a particle of food for the next day’s need, When they lay down that night, she prayed with her children, without telling them of her helplessness — for, indeed, she was not helpless while she trusted God as her helper. With the new, bright morning the mother prayed for their daily bread, assured that her Father could. supply it — as he alone knew how.

She asked her children to go down to the shore before breakfast, and get some clean sand from the beach for their sitting-room floor. Before the days of woolen carpets, in the humbler New England homes they were accustomed to strew sand on the floor, and to ornament the borders by arranging it in figures with a broom. When ‘the children had gone, the mother again kneeled and prayed for their daily Boyvbood Lessons of Trust in God

bread. After this she spread the breakfast-table, for which she had no food.

Suddenly the children returned without the sand, but bringing gleefully a fine fish, which they had found in a hollow of the beach, as left by the outgoing tide after the storm, and which they together had captured. As with a grateful heart she thanked God for his goodness, and began to prepare the fish for their breakfast, she was called to the door by a visitor.

A man from the country above the village had called to say that on one occasion her husband, now dead, had done some work for this man for which he had not been paid. The man had now brought a bushel and a half of corn-meal to give the widow on account, promising to bring more by and by. As with swelling heart the mother thanked the donor, and brought the meal into their now doubly glad home, she told the children of how God had answered her prayer, and

they kneeled together to give him thanks, 9

‘{llustrative Answers to Prayer

Then she hastily made a “johnny-cake” of the Indian-meal, and baked it by the fire, while she broiled the fish for their breakfast. Together they asked God’s blessing on that God-given meal, and thenceforward they served and trusted God more fully and joyously than ever.

The village neighbors, when they learned of God’s care of one whom they had unintentionally neglected, resolved henceforth to minister more faithfully to her whom God had privileged to represent him in their community. When I heard that story from my dear mother, it didn’t seem any more strange, or any less true, than the Bible stories. Indeed, it didn’t seem so very strange anyway. It seemed just like God. And I think so still. I’ve never had reason to think differently.

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