There was quite a crowd of children at the Sea-side Mission meeting. They were sitting round in a half-circle on the pebbles facing the Mission speaker. The speaker was a big man with a round, happy face and a smile that made you want to smile, too. He spoke quietly, but his voice carried a surprisingly long way. Everyone was listening very attentively to what he was saying, and from away down by the sea came the sound of children shouting and splashing in the water.
Suddenly, from behind the speaker, there appeared a flying figure with two big boys in pursuit. It was Jimmy!
Now Jimmy was never a very tidy little boy—after all he was only seven, but now, with his coat hanging half-off, his shirt-buttons all undone, and his hair hanging all over his eyes, he looked like a scareccrow. And with a rattle of pebbles and loud gasps for breath he landed plump in the middle of the Children’s Service, right at the speaker’s feet.
“They’re after me,” he gasped.
The speaker dismissed the two pursuers, and turned his attention to Jimmy himself. “What’s the trouble?” he asked.
“I kicked over their sand-castle and they come after me,” Jimmy explained. with tearful relief.
“But what did you do that for?”
“Well, I could see how it looked when it was standing up like, and I wanted to see what it would look like kicked down, so I did it, and then they come after me.”
“O, I see. What’s your name?” “Jimmy, sir.”
“Well, Jimmy, I think you’d better sit down with the rest now and listen,”
Having finished what be had been saying, the man presently started them singing choruses. Jimmy noticed that most of the children knew them.
“Been here before,” he thought.
There was one they seemed very fond of,
“Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to Him belong,
They are weak, but He is strong.”
They sang it several times and Jimmy had just got the tune when the man asked if anyone would like to come up and sing it by themselves. Now Jimmy was a little street-boy, and boys will always try anything once, so Jimmy stepped forward.
“Well, come on Jimmy. Let’s see if you can sing choruses as well as you kick over sand-castles. Ready with the music? Right: one—two—three.”
“Jesus loves me this I know,
For the Bible tells me so ... .”
Jimmy got through it quite well, with help from the man when he went wrong, and the other children clapped.
“Quite good, Jimmy,” said the man. patting him on the shoulder. “Do you believe what you’ve just sung?”
“No, sir,” said Jimmy, frankly.
“But why did you sing it if you don’t. believe it?”
“Well, you asked me to, didn’t you?” Jimmy replied. The man smiled and sent him back to his place.
“Well, you know how to tell the truth, Jimmy. And that’s a lot,” was all he said, but when he came to speak to the children, after the choruses were finished, he made the Gospel story of the Lord Jesus very simple, and he often looked at Jimmy while he was talking.
But Jimmy was not listening very much. The words he had sung, and said he didn’t believe, kept running through his mind, and when the meeting had finished, and the other children had gone, he came up to the man.
“Hello, Jimmy, what is it now?”
“I want to know where the Bible tells me so, that Jesus loves me,” he said.
A little black book, with gold and red edges, appeared in the man’s hand from nowhere—like a conjuring trick, Jimmy thought—and in that quiet, penetrating voice Jimmy heard,
And then, for a quarter of an hour, the speaker of the Children’s Mission explained to this ragged little street-boy, down at the seaside in a holiday home, how Jesus loved him, and died so sadly and shamefully, so that he, Jimmy, could go to heaven. Jimmy listened very carefully and then he asked:
“Can I come and sing that again tomorrow?”
“Of course you can.”
Jimmy thought hard for a minute, for he was a truthful boy, and wanted to get the number right.
“And I shall sing it—about— ‘free times gooder’ this time, ‘cos I believe it now,” he said.
And that was how Jimmy found out that Jesus loved him.
ML 05/10/1942