Here is news to set your heart all a-pitying, and then praise God, all a-glowing. It is a real up-to-date Daniel-in-the lions’-den story, about a little girl this time.
Repeatedly she had run away from her heathen home to a Bible School some little distance off, only to be dragged back again by her perturbed mother, who was anxious “to save” her little daughter from the native teacher’s medicine (religion) that had such uncanny power to change lives. But beat her as she would, away would bolt little “swift-foot” to join the sweet singing, and the A B C class, and the memorizing of Bible stories which she loved. In despair her mother handed her over to the fierce witch doctor “to put fear upon her.” At all costs she must be prevented from having her “ears closed” by those Christians. So the wizard, keeping her in the dark, first tried to scare her into obedience by his gruesome conjuring, and incantations, and grisly magic.
This failing, as she slipped off again to school and learned fresh Christian teaching, he forced bitter medicines into her to kill off this new batch of microbes—which antidote nearly killed her! But with returning strength there she was at the school again!
The sorely-disappointed and now desperate mother determined on a last effort, of the really kill-or-cure order, to rescue her child for the time-honored tribal customs so necessary for girls. Driving her away from the school into the forest, she bound her little daughter to a tree with bark rope stripped off a sapling, saying,
“A worthless child art thou to rne—but food for lions!”
If the spirits aided her, the lions would only frighten this “Jesus belief” out of her child, and all would be peace in the home again.
If not—well, she would lose from it nothing now of value. So she left her. And the dreaded black night enveloped that shivering little girl alone in the dreary African forest.
Try to picture that little mite bound there, hearing so acutely each tiny twig as it cracked beneath the feet of the stealthily advancing beasts, and the rustling among the fallen leaves telling her of the presence of deadly snakes or stinging scorpions. Ah! the terror of it all! But most surely the angel of the Lord had encamped around that tree, for when at dawn a Christian boy found her, and cut her loose, he saw lion tracks encircling the spot, but noted that not one animal had dared to encroach upon a definite boundary of four arm’s length from her. She had seen their glaring eyes as moving balls of fire, but she said she remembered what she had learned in school, that God made the lions and that He had made her, too, and so fear left her; she felt so sure God wouldn’t let them eat her up.
“Marvelous!” we exclaim. But why so? Wasn’t it God responding to the simple faith of a little girl?
Satan would like us to believe that the little ones are unable to understand relious instruction, so why waste time upon them?
Even the disciples thought that little children were too insignificant for their Master’s time to be taken up with them. But I like to note how Christ turned the tables upon them by saying
“Except ye become as little children.” O! to get back to the childhood of TRUST.
ML 10/05/1941