The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1909, Page 68

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68

The Lutheran Pioneer.

A City Missionary’s Experience.

A city missionary of New York was passing
through a hallway of a tenement house, and halted
at-an open door. It was a clean and tidy room,
but meagerly furnished. Three children and their
mother sat about the table on which there was noth-
ing to eat but a loaf of bread. As the missionary
paused, the mother and children had just bowed
their heads, and he heard the grace they were say-
ing. It is a verse used in many German Lutheran
churches in closing the service, and the pastor was
somewhat familiar with it. It reads as follows:

Let our going out be blest,

Bless our entrance in like measure;
Bless, O Lord, our toil and rest,

Bless our bread, our grief and pleasure;
Be in death Thy blessing given,

And make us blest heirs of heaven.

That evening there was a meeting of the Board
of Directors of the mission,-and supper was served.
Being invited to say grace, the missionary did so
in the words he had heard in that tenement house.
He afterwards related to the guests his experience
that day. Scarcely had he finished, when a stranger
approached him, much excited. He was passing
through the city, and had come with a friend to
the meeting.

He requested that the missionary would take
him to that tenement house. He then related the
following story:

Many years ago my sister and I were orphans,
and our good old grandmother in Scotland brought
us up carefully in the fear of the Lord. She taught
- us the table-prayer you have just heard. My sister
married very young and moved far away. Soon
after that my grandmother died, and I came to
America, and lost all trace of my only living rela-
tive. But out in my home in the West we say that
prayer every day, and I am sure my sister, if she
is still alive, does the same in her. family. God
knows how I have longed and prayed to find her
again. May not this prayer bring us together once
more by the good providence of God?”

And so it really came to pass. When the widow
opened the door in answer to the missionary’s knock
that evening, she. at once recognized her long-lost
brother, and after the first joyful greetings he pro-
vided light and warmth and food in plenty, so that
the children, on waking from their sleep, thought
they were dreaming.

* “The widow’s story was a sad recital of the long
struggle in a strange land that left them daily

poorer. ‘“‘I'o-day we ate our last loaf of bread,”
she said, “and I did not know of another thing to
pawn, or where to go for a loan. My trust in God
was so shaken that when we said our grace, it
seemed like mockery, until I came to the words,
‘Bless our bread, our grief and pleasure,’ when 1
felt how much we needed God’s blessing, and be-
sought it with all my heart. Little did T think that
He would answer the prayer so wonderfully.”

As the missionary went his way, he felt it was
worth all his days of weary and oft seemingly fruit-
less work to have had a share in bringing about so
much happiness. He meant to keep sight of this
family in the future, but the good brother took
them all along to his Western home, where, no
doubt, the old petition for grace is said with a deeper
reverence than ever before. — Hachange.

A Little Boy’s Mission Gift.

Cyrus Hamlin, a missionary in Syria, told the
following story from his early life:

In my boyhood days the greatest event of the
season was the autumn muster, or gathering of sol-
diers for review. Every boy who went to the
muster had his money to buy gingerbread on that
great day.

It was a bright September morning. My mother
gave me seven cents to buy gingerbread, and a cent
then would buy a pretty large piece. I was think-
ing how I could spend all that money in one day,
when my mother said, “Perhaps, Cyrus, you will
put a cent or two in Mrs. Farris’s contribution box
as you go by.”

As I went along I kept thinking; my mother
said a cent or two. I wished she had told me to
put in one cent or two cents; but there it was:
“Perhaps, Cyrus, you will put in a cent or two.”
As I turned it over in my mind during the first
mile of my walk, I thought, “Well, I will put in
two cents.” Then I began to reason with myself:
“How would that look? ‘Two cents for the heathen
and five cents for gingerbread!” It did not satisfy
my ideas very well, because we always read the
missionary news at our house, and my conscience
was tender on the subject. Two cents did not look
right, and so I thought I would put three cents
into the box. :

I went along for a time very comfortably after
I had come to this decision. But by-and-by the old
reasoning came back to me: “Four cents for ginger-