AFTER MANY DAYS | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 29, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 51.

AFTER MANY DAYS.

A FEW mornings ago a member of the mission, a Christian young in holy experience, was asked to lead the prayer service that evening. He was unused to public speaking; he had never led a meeting of any kind in all his thirty odd years of life; and he assented to the request with much perturbation of spirit.

During all that day he was busily engaged in work that would admit of no delay; yet the thought of the impending trial—for it was a trial—lowered over him like an inky cloud, and filled him with vague dismay.

At length as the sun drew near the western bluffs, and the slim shadows of swaying trees crept shyly out into the laughing waters of the lake, he pushed his work aside, and with a choking fear of failure on him, and a wild longing to be spared the trying ordeal, he took up his Bible, and began turning over the leaves in the hope of meeting some verse that might prove an inspiration to him.

The Bible had been given him one New Year's morning eleven years ago, by the sweetest, tenderest, dearest mother that ever blessed the life of an unworthy son; and though—until within the last few weeks—he had scarcely opened it, yet he had carried it with him wherever he had gone, for sin had not yet so eaten into his soul that he could cast from him a gift placed by the dear mother hands in his own.

As he sat anxiously turning over the leaves, with a prayer on his lips that he might be able to say some word that would reach some heart that evening, he came upon a newspaper clipping lying between the sixth and seventh chapters of Proverbs. Three verses of the sixth chapter were marked, and these were the verses:—

"My son, keep thy father's commandment, and forsake not the law of thy mother; "Bind them continually upon thine heart, and tie them about thy neck. "When thou goest, it shall lead thee; when thou sleepest, it shall keep thee; and when thou wakest, it shall talk with thee."

He turned to the newspaper clipping, and this is what he read:—