The kids all loved Lindy! When they heard him playing his mouth organ at noon and at recess, they always gathered around to listen and to sing. Lindy knew the best choruses, and could he make that old harmonica sing!
Lindy was the janitor for the little school on the edge of the city where Elizabeth went to school. He was thin and “baldish” and could tell stories, as well as play the mouth organ. Usually he told them Bible stories at recess time if they wanted him to, and sometimes the teachers would let him come to their rooms and tell them.
Elizabeth loved to hear these stories although she was not saved. Her mother and daddy were saved, and she often wished that she were too. Lindy made being a Christian seem like such a happy thing. Sometimes during the school hours she could hear Lindy’s mouth organ faintly as he sat down in the furnace room playing “Jesus loves me” and other choruses. One song Lindy loved especially was: “There’s going to be a meeting in the air, In the sweet bye and bye, And, oh! I hope I’ll meet you over there Away beyond the sky.
Such singing you will hear
Never heard by mortal ear,
‘Twill be glorious I declare!
And God’s own Son will be the meeting One
In that meeting in the air!”
This chorus troubled Elizabeth. At recess and at noon Lindy would ring a cowbell to call them in to their classes, and sometimes if Elizabeth were far off in a field playing she would not hear him ring the bell and would be late getting back to school. Would it be like that for her when the Lord Jesus came to take the Christians to heaven? Knowing that she was still a sinner, Elizabeth felt that she was far away from God, and would not hear that trumpet sound or the glad shout that would call the Christians to that “meeting in the air.”
Each summer Elizabeth went to a Bible camp for boys and girls. Camp was always real fun, but the summer Elizabeth was nine the Lord began troubling her more and more about her need of receiving the Lord Jesus as her personal Savior. Especially at night around the campfire God would speak to her heart as other boys and girls would give their testimonies telling how the Lord had saved them. How Elizabeth longed to have something to say, but her heart was empty.
Then, there was something she really dreaded at camp, and that was the swimming lessons. She could not swim and had such a fear of drowning. Each day when the swimming hour came she would think, “Oh, if only I were saved, at least I would go to heaven if I drowned!”
But of course Elizabeth did not drown, the lifeguard was always watching carefully. It was a comfort to see him sitting in his tower or out in a boat always ready to rescue anyone who needed help. If Elizabeth had only had the eyes of her heart opened, she would have seen that the Lord Jesus was watching and longing to rescue her, too, from the sea of sin in which everyone is sinking who has not received the Lord Jesus as their Savior.
Many boys and girls were saved at camp, but Elizabeth was not one of them. After she went home God’s Holy Spirit continued to remind her of things she had learned at camp, and from her parents and Lindy. God especially seemed to speak to her through the choruses she had learned at camp, and through Lindy.
Then one day in August she knelt down and told the Lord Jesus that she wanted to belong to Him. She was sorry for her sins, and so glad that the Lord Jesus had borne her punishment on the cross. Then Lindy’s song that had troubled her became one that she loved to sing again and again, “There’s going to be a meeting in the air, In the sweet, bye and bye!”