The Lord's Nursery Garden by Ernest Lloyd

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 1, 1915

"The Lord's Nursery Garden"

By Ernest Lloyd

WHEN in Long Beach a few weeks ago, I visited Brother Hofgaarden's nursery garden—a large plot of ground set apart for the propagation of all kinds of plants, shrubs, and young trees. This nursery needs constant care, incessant watchfulness, and careful gardening. It contains the reserve stock of young plants for supplying failure by disease, accident, and death in the surrounding gardens and private as well as public parks. They are all indebted to this nursery garden for their supply.

The junior department of our work is the nursery garden, to which our mission fields are indebted. Neglect this department, and when our missionaries and colporteurs fall in the far-off fields of battle, who shall fill up the gaps? We are glad that the leaders of our young people are providing fascinating and stirring missionary reading for our boys and girls in the splendid Reading Courses. Why should our youth know more about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln than about John Williams, George Whitefield, and Robert Moffat? Nothing will stir our youth to greater purposes than the heroic names and deeds of all the missionaries of Jesus. Let us educate them in this noble and historic literature, and they will know, and they will feel, and they will sympathize, and they will help, and we shall not have failure.

A little woman in one of our small schools sent me a sweet letter some months ago, and it contained the following beautiful paragraph: "I made up my mind to give $2.50 toward this year's goal. I expect to give half of it at our next Junior meeting in the church school. The rest of it I intend to earn by taking care of two little children on the evenings their mother goes to the lodge. She pays me twenty-five cents every time I stay with them. I am going to take the Junior Reading Course. I am eleven and a half years old, and I do want to be a missionary." Another earnest little girl, the secretary of a society, writes to know "where we might get permission to put up racks for our papers in the stations." These little endeavorers are taking as much interest in the general missionary movement of the church as are many of the older members.

From Redlands comes this good message: "Our society is lending packages of tracts in the vicinity of the school. Some of the pupils are quite successful in placing these in the homes of the people. The pupils have recently sold a dollar's worth of the Scripture cards. They spend a part of the noon hour in this work, and enjoy it very much."

So the missionary movement is "going and growing" among the Junior societies at an encouraging rate. The Lord is using the children again. Let us be careful that we do not hinder him.

How may we best aid and encourage this vital department of our work? It is to home influence and home prayers and home example that we must look. Brethren and sisters, let your prayers in your household be genuine prayers; transfuse them with earnestness for those dear boys and girls who are kneeling with you. Let them not be mere utterances of words, but a tender yearning for the souls of the children, and we shall find that "along with the fathers there shall come up the children, a seed to serve the Lord, and a generation to call him blessed." ERNEST LLOYD.