The Joy Of Begging To Belong To The Lord Jesus: A Testimony

A radiant young girl, the daughter of a wealthy silk merchant of Lyons, was dancing at a fashionable ball. Her gown was the richest, her face the loveliest, and her step the lightest in all that gay assembly. She was engaged to the most popular young man in her social set, the wedding was due within a week.

Suddenly, in the middle of a minute, her foot faltered and her eyes grew wide and misty, as she looked past her partner into what had become a dull blur of filmed colours. A vision had come to her, suddenly, unaccountably, wiping out the gay scene and fixing her eyes upon Eternity.

She, the careless butterfly of only a moment ago, had seen a vision of a dying world. In that flash of unearthly intuition, she knew, with the unshakeable certainty of the soul that has been touched by God, that the world was dying for lack of prayer. The world was perishing for lack of man’s vital air. It was cut off from the very source of life, slowly dying the death of the asphyxiated. She seemed to hear its laboured breathing-uneven, stertorous, spasmodic. She saw creation sink into nothingness and no one there to save, no one even to recognise the peril. Around her, her friends were dancing, unaware that it was a dance of death. In a corner, a smiling, debonair priest discussed the relative merits of eligible young men with a match-making mother. Ah, what chance for a dying world when the Church herself is drugged in slumber!

But God was watching and had of His inscrutable mercy awakened her. Why? Why did she stand there, the only watcher among somnambulists? With a swift resolute motion of soul, intense as leaping flame, she there and then renounced all that life had to offer her and vowed herself to ceaseless prayer on behalf of a dying world.

Deaf to the entreaties of parents and lover, impregnable with the strength of those who have seen...

From the Book “Creative Prayer” by E. Herman, James Clark & Co. Ltd, 1921, Pages 15-16.