“Where am I?” The words fell unconsciously from Emily Summers’ lips as she awoke with a start to find herself the occupant of a little white bed in a hospital ward.
“Oh yes! I remember. Of course I came in here yesterday. How strange it all seems!” she murmured.
All the other patients were by this time well awake, and after a few minutes, Emily sat up to take stock of her companions.
“There are three or four girls quite as young as I am,” she thought to herself; then, turning her eyes to the bed next to her, she encountered a merry, saucy face regarding her from under a frizzy mop of black hair.
“Well, what do you think of me?” came the somewhat embarrassing question from the owner of the black hair.
“I-I-don’t know. I only came here last night,” stammered Emily, blushing nervously.
“Really, now! and your name’s Emily, because I heard them call you that, and mine’s Emma, so we’d better be friends. Hateful name, Emma —sounds as if you had come out of the Ark,” concluded the talkative young lady.
“Well, I don’t think so,” returned Emily with some spirit, and thereupon a heated discussion ensued, in the course of which the girls became fast friends.
One Sunday, towards the end of their stay in the hospital, Emma, with characteristic out-spokenness, suddenly said: “I do hate Sundays, don’t you? They’re so boring. You can’t do anything you want to. Dull, I call it!”
“No! I don’t call it dull,” said Emily, thoughtfully. “Neither would you,” she added, “if you loved the Lord Jesus and knew Him for your Friend.”
It cost Emily something to say this, for she was a very young Christian; but Emma only lay back on her bed and laughed.
In a few weeks both girls were well enough to return to their own homes, and as they said good-by, Emma carelessly laughed, and said, “Thank you for all your ‘preaches,’ Emily. I wonder when we shall meet again.”
Thirty years later, Emily—by this time, sad to say, a confirmed invalid —was lying on her couch sewing, when there came a knock at the door.
A middle-aged woman entered, walked up to Emily’s couch, and said: “You don’t know me, of course!”
“Oh! but I think I know your face,” returned Emily, as she scanned her visitor. “Why, surely you are the girl with the black hair, who was in the bed next to mine in the hospital many years ago.”
“Fancy remembering me! You haven’t altered much, though,” replied Emma.
“I have been searching for you for a week,” she continued, “for I have been wanting to tell you something forever so long.
“Your ‘preaches,’ as I used to call them, were not without effect. I used to make out that I didn’t care, and was only bored; but I wasn’t really; and after I got home I felt so miserable that I just went straight to the Lord Jesus and asked Him to forgive all my sins.
“He did forgive me, and ever since I have been following Him, and I have often longed to tell you.”
“Another proof that no word spoken in His name is ever lost,” said Emily, looking up at her friend with tears of happiness in her eyes.
ML 12/10/1961