Teaching Lessons of Trust to My Helper

Because John Wattles, my God-given friend and helper, was younger tha. myself in years and Christian experience, I felt it to be my duty and privilege to give him the benefit of any lesson I had learned in God’s service, and he was ever ready to heed and to profit by such suggestions, These lessons were in various lines, as from time to time I thought he had special need.

One afternoon, as he came into my Hartford home after several hours’ absence in the city, he mentioned to me that he had, since he went out, lost a gold sleeve-button which he greatly prized as a souvenir. I asked him what effort he had made to recover it. He answered, “None,” for he

had been in so many places, since he left 75

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home, that he had no reason for looking in any one place more than another.

A lesson that I then desired to teach him was the importance of persistent thoroughness in whatever he had to do, so I said to him:

“Well, I think you had better not say that you can’t find it in any place till at least you have looked in all places where you may have left it. Why not carefully retrace your steps to the ten places or the twenty that you have been in since you last saw it, and see what comes of that?”

Promptly he started out to do as I suggested, while I remained at my study table.

As I sat writing, the thought came to me that I had started my young friend on this mission in his own strength, without suggesting to him that it was only by God’s guidance that he could hope to be successful, and for that guidance he should pray at the start. For this omission I reproached myself, and was heartily ashamed, 76

Teaching Lessons of Trust to my Helper

Dropping on my knees by my study chair, I prayed to God:

“Father, forgive me! Here have I started out this loved child of thine on a search where he needs thy special help, - without suggesting that he should seek that help trustfully. Moreover, I have not myself prayed for thy help to him. Grant now that he suffers no loss through my failure toward thee.”

As I rose from my knees, John Wattles entered the outside door, saying, “I’ve found the sleeve-button.” At this the thought came to me, “Your prayer then had nothing to do with this; for he must have found the button before you prayed.” “Tell me where you found it,” I said.

“Well, that’s strangest of all,” he responded. “I had retraced my steps so far as I could recall them, looking about me all the way, but I reached the house again without finding anything. Justas my hand was on the door-knob to enter here, I was prompted to stop and look back, and there Ulustrative Bnewers to Prayer

on the very door-step, where it must have been all the while, was the missing sleeve- button.”

There was not much room to doubt God’s part in all this. I told Wattles of my conscious failure and my penitent prayer, and then we kneeled together before God, and gave him thanks for our newly learned lesson, and we tried thenceforward to profit by it.

After some three years in the work to which I had originally invited him, Mr. Wattles came to feel that at the best there was no immediate prospect there of promotion into any such service as would seem to be worthy of the best endeavors of his life, and he began to look about him for a more promising sphere. The life-insurance field was at that time offering special inducements to energetic canvassers, and he had reason to think he might be peculiarly successful in it. He came to me seeking counsel in the matter. I asked

him whether he thought that God had 78

Teaching Lessons of Trust to my Helper

called him to the place he was now in. He said he did. I asked him whether this place still demanded all the powers he now had. He said it did. Iasked him whether God had given him any special indication that he ought to go elsewhere. He said he had not. I asked him whether, in case God really wanted him to stay where he was all his life, with no other gain than the gain of serving God there, he would be willing to yield all his personal ambitions and desires for other service, and to live and die just there.

He thought over this question for a few minutes, and then he said heartily that he was ready to be led of God as to his life work, and that he would trust God to show him just where he could best serve and honor God. Here was another turning-point in his life path, or, rather, another point at which he refused to turn from that path. Within a year of that time the great financial crash of 1873 came, with its shattering, for the time, of the best possibilities he sonuneed to life’s ae Thus ae Sa he saw that God was ready to lead one who wanted to be led of God. =

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