The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1927, Page 92

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92 THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

to the services held there. Tom had lived at
Kings Landing with his aged wife for many, many
years. In the home a little grandchild, Annie, was
brought up. Like thousands of other colored people
in the Black Belt, Tom and his little family were
poor. The one-room hut and its contents bore mute,
but emphatic testimony to the extreme poverty of
Tom and his people. Working a little patch of land,
for which he paid rent, Tom was unable to provide
himself with even the bare necessities of life. And
so the years rolled by for Tom, with too little on
which to live and too much to die! A mean, miser-
able, and dreary existence he had in this world —
and no brighter outlook for the world to come.

Tom was a sinner. He had never joined a church
and cared nothing for the churches or the preachers
at Kings Landing. So the years rolled by, and each
setting sun brought him nearer to eternity. On his
head the gray hair testified that he had but a few
years to live. He was in poor health. It looked as
though another wretched sinner was lost to God and
heaven.

But God desired to save Tom and his family.
When the Lutheran Church came to Kings Landing
with her message of the redeeming love of Christ,
curiosity brought Tom and his wife and also his
grandchild to the services. Tom came again.
Coming back to his humble hut, he talked with his
wife about the things he had heard at the Lutheran
church, about sin, death, eternity, Judgment, but
also about the love of Christ for poor sinners. “Can
it. be true,” he asked his wife, “that Jesus loves
sinners? Can it be that Jesus will accept me just
as I am, poor and sinful? Will He, when we die,
take us to that place of joy of which the Lutheran
preacher spoke to us to-day?” With such questions
in his heart Tom came again and again to our
Lutheran services, always bringing with him his old,
gray-haired wife and their little grandchild. After
each service they would silently and thoughtfully
wend their way to that one-room shack among the
pine-trees. Little Annie could read a little. Many
are the times that this little family took a torn and
ragged copy of the holy Bible from the place where
it had rested untouched so long, gathered around the
fireplace, and there, by the flickering light of burn-

_ ing logs, they read God’s precious Word. As the
Savior looked from heaven upon this scene, how He
did rejoice! He sent His Holy Spirit and brought
these erring sinners to a conviction of their sin and

_to faith in His blood, and filled their hearts with the
sure and firm hope of everlasting life. Tom and his

_ family joined the Lutheran Church.

But the devil gave Tom no rest. In a thousand
ways he tried to shake the faith of this precious soul,
now safe in the hands of Christ.

Tom’s grandchild was stolen from him. Through-
out the years of her dependency she had been cared
for by her grandparents, and now that she had
reached the age where she could have been of help
to the aged couple, a woman came and stole the little
girl, taking her to a place a hundred miles away.
With tears in their eyes the aged Tom and his wife
came to the missionary and told of their sad expe-
rience and asked him for advice. We decided to go
to the place where we believed the girl was secreted.
Over a hundred miles of Alabama roads we traveled,
through woods and open spaces, in search of the
missing girl. We found her and put her in our car
to take her back to Kings Landing. But the trip
was too much for Tom. He took violently sick, and
medical aid was given him in a little town far from
his home. The relief was only momentary. It be-
came necessary for the missionary to stop, late in the
night, in a little village and get a doctor for Tom,
who by this time was rolling around in the back of
the car in agony and pain. Little hope was held
out for him by the doctor. Advised to get him to
a hospital without delay for operation, we sent a
prayer to God for help, and with our precious cargo
in the back seat of our Ford we started for the
hospital in Selma, fifty miles away. It, is not
necessary to mention the difficulty we had with our
Ford—our lights, excepting for one dimmer,
burned out,—and it became necessary to light
a fire by the side of the road at two o’clock in the
morning in order to have light by means of which
we tried to do some repair work on the car. Suffice
it to say that we finally reached Selma with Tom
more dead than alive. A doctor was called at three
o’clock that morning, and Tom was placed on the
operating table. Though he lingered in that hospital
between life and death for weeks, God heard our
prayers and restored him to fairly good health. And
we recall how God stirred the heart of some kind
friend to send us a check, a large check, with which
to pay hospital bills. We picked this check from the
mail-box on Easter morning, three years ago.

Back in Tom’s little hut there was general
rejoicing when he came home. Faithfully he and
his little family attended the services, joyful because
he was assured of having a kind and loving Savior.

Driven by necessity and being convinced that he
could make a little money at a different point, Tom
bade his wife and granddaughter good-by and went
in search of work. This was in April. He found

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