ONE afternoon we visited an old woman who lived alone and at a distance. She was very poor, but through the years we had known her, I had never heard a murmur from her lips. Her family were all dead, and she was left, as she described herself, “a lone orphan of seventy-four.”
I had called once long before to see her, and noticed a gap in the old thatched roof above my head.
“What do you do when the rain comes down?” I asked with symphony.
“Why, I just thank God, dear, that the hole is no bigger!” was the unexpected reply.
So on this winter day I set out to see her. There lay the old woman in bed, feeble and weak, but with a smile of welcome on her face.
As I thought of all the comfort which we had left and the care which surrounded us, I exclaimed in pity, “Betty, who is taking care of you?”
She raised her trembling hands and put them together, and answered with a look of happy conviction: “The Almighty, dear!”
“And what can we do for you?”
With a smile that any queen might envy, the feeble old woman looked up and said, “Can you help me to praise Him, dears, for all that He has done for me?”
Alone, with no human hand to care for her, she had lain in bed with little food or fire, but in her heart was the profound conviction that the words of the worn, brown Bible at her side were true:
“Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him;” and no heart was richer than hers.
What Does the Lord See?
ML-05/06/1962