Whisper down the lane

Preacher Thomas De Witt Talmage tells that one day in the early 1630s a woman, whose name is forgotten, handed a tract to a bad man by the name of Richard Baxter. He read it and got saved.

Puritan Richard Baxter wrote a book entitled "The Call to the Unconverted," which was read by many, including a person named Philip Doddridge. Hymn-writer Doddridge then wrote "The Rise and Progress of Religion," which won multitudes for the kingdom, among them the slave emancipator William Wilberforce.

Wilberforce penned "A Practical View of Christianity," which ambushed Leigh Richmond into God's service. Richmond produced a tract entitled "The Diaryman's Daughter," four million copies of which were disseminated in fifty languages before 1848.

It all reminds me of the little boy whose mother made him take a lunch with him the day he went into the countryside to hear an itinerant preacher. The preacher preached on and on, and the people who were gathered on the grassy hill were hungry. "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?" is the question Andrew asked, and that we keep asking to this day --- when we should really know by now that it's the willingness, and not the size of the gift that counts with God.