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Aiming Straight

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 20, 1913

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 90, No. 8.

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Aiming Straight

By W. A. S.

The story of missionary effort shows that oftentimes the unusual method of approach is used of the Lord to start an honest soul into serious thinking concerning the truth. While I was visiting the work and workers in Montevideo, Uruguay, a few months ago, Miss Colley, one of our sisters from England, who is working in South America, told me how the truth came to her.
She was ill in a hospital in one of the cities of England. One of our sisters of that west of England town, evidently with a direct, hearty way, was also a patient for a few days in the hospital. One day she said to Miss Colley, “Do you keep the ten commandments?”
“I hope I do,” Miss Colley replied.
“But you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You keep nine, but not ten,” her kindly pursuer said.
“Which one am I not keeping?”
“The fourth. You don’t keep the fourth commandment.”
“Yes, I do; I have always kept the Sunday.”
“But Sunday is not the Sabbath. Sunday is the first day. The commandment says, ‘The seventh day is the Sabbath;’ and you don’t keep it. Seventh-day Adventists keep the Sabbath, and you ought to keep it.”
This was the first lesson in the hospital ward; and the young patient felt in her soul the challenge of ideas and truth altogether new.
Then from day to day our sister kept “rubbing it in,” as Miss Colley said, and explaining the real bearing of the fourth commandment. “You keep only nine of the commandments,” the sister said, “but Seventh-day Adventists keep ten.”
This unstudied and natural and vigorous effort, just because it came from a heart of love that was aiming straight for the mark, was effective. It was an abruptness that had in it no mere spirit of the argumentative or the controversial, but only of kindly yet insistent interest. On recovering from her illness, Miss Colley went to our meetings with her new-found friend, and fully accepted the truth and is rejoicing in it, now being a representative of the truth in far Montevideo.
What a pity it would have been had our sister with the straight aim let those few days at the hospital pass with no effort to send the arrow of truth into some waiting heart.
W. A. S.