I WAS in the habit of visiting a boy about fourteen, who with friends lived in a garret. It was a painful sight to behold him, one arm and hand was quite paralysed, and the other almost useless. Besides this, his poor little wasted body was covered with abscesses, which caused him a great deal of pain at times.
He was not able to get into the green fields, for they were far away in the country, and the house in which he had but a little room at the top, was in the court of a back street. But the sun would now and then peep through the great clump of chimney pots, and shine in and cheer him, and now and then a little stray current of fresh air would overcome all difficulties and fan his cheek. He could it and watch the little bits of geraniums in the pots that stood outside, striving hard to look bright and to give him a little fragrance in return for the drops of water that were given them occasionally.
But his happiness of heart, and his cheerful-looking face, in spite of the white cheeks from which the color had long since fled, did not depend upon these, thankful as he was for them, but he had been reading the Bible, and God had spoken peace to his young heart from His own Word.
On one occasion we were talking of the rich man and Lazarus, in Luke's Gospel, when he said,
"0, sir, I would rather be the Lazarus (and my body seems much like his), than the one inside in .the purple and fine linen, and the feasting, because I have Jesus."
"And are you satisfied with Him?"
"Indeed I am," said he with such an expression that I shall-not easily forget, and he added, "I have a poor body; but I have Jesus, and that's more than enough."
I can't tell you how joyful it made me to hear a little boy talk like that. Jesus was precious to him, and although he had such a poor body, he had a happy heart, that all the gold and silver in the world could not give—he had peace with God through faith in the Loid Jesus Christ; and he knew from the Word of God, that presently he would have a beautiful body, and all the weakness would be gone, when he was with Jesus and like Him.
I like to visit that dingy garret, and have a little talk with the poor boy about Jesus. It reminds me of what a poet once sang about a Sunday-school,
"I have been there and still would go, 'Tis like a little heaven below."
May the many little boys and girls who read "Messages of Love," find in Jesus a Saviour and a guide through the slippery paths of youth, and they will find that no good thing He withholds from them that walk uprightly.
Messages of God’s Love 8/21/1932