p. 11 | An Answered Prayer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Feb 18, 1904

An Answered Prayer

MR. JENNINGS had passed his three-score and ten, and had come to a time of enforced inactivity. A long illness kept him for months in bed, and when he recovered, he had dropped out of the procession; every one recognized his breakdown as the unmistakable sign that his days of work were over. Mr. Jennings was not altogether happy. He almost resented the fact that the church and the community could get on so well without him, and it seemed hard that his manly vigor, carried so finely into old age, should waste in unwilling idleness, with nothing to look forward to but final helplessness and death.

“I stay at home and pray,” he said, “but I can do nothing to answer my own prayers. I can’t go to meeting, and I have little chance to influence any one for good. The world has gone by while I have been resting by the way, and I can’t catch up.”

Mrs. Jennings comforted him, and the aged pair sat down together, making the most of each other’s companionship, and daily praying for the Lord’s work, which was going on without them.

One morning the two old saints finished their breakfast, read their chapter in the Bible, and knelt down, according to their custom, to thank God for their blessings, to ask his guidance and care for the grown-up and scattered family, and his benediction on the work which others were doing, and in which they no longer had a share.

While they were on their knees, a ladder rose against the open window, and a man began to ascend. The old couple were a little deaf, and prayed on. The carpenter, who had come to repair the roof by the bay window, ascended two rounds, and stopped. He stood for a minute, at least, undecided whether to go up or down or to stay where he was; then he descended quietly and stole away.

A little way from the house the carpenter sat down in the shade and waited. The prayer was not a short one, and its tones still came to him. He recalled the words he had heard on the ladder, and his eyes filled with tears; he brushed them away, but they came again; he thought of another gray-haired couple, now dead, who never failed, while they lived, to pray to God for an absent son.

He remounted the ladder at length, but the accents of that prayer rose and fell in his ears with the tapping of the hammer; and when Mr. Jennings came out and leaned on his staff and inquired about the repairs which the roof needed, the carpenter felt as if he had received a benediction.

All this was eight months ago, in Chicago. A few days ago Mr. Jennings’ door-bell rang, and a man entered, and said: “I am the carpenter who repaired your roof last spring. I had godly parents, but I entered the army, and led a hard life. I had not been to church nor heard a prayer for years. I heard your prayer when I put up the ladder. For eight months, by the help of God, I have lived a new life.”

Then Mr. and Mrs. Jennings knelt down again and thanked God for an unexpected answer to their prayers.—Selected.