Praying for Tea.
On a top floor in a street of tenements lives a colored woman one hundred and ten years old! Her son, a man over seventy, lost his wife, a neat, active Christian woman, very suddenly, and his aged mother was plunged in despairing grief. "Why, why was I left, old and rheumatic and useless, and Mary, a smart, busy, capable woman taken away without a minute's warning?" was her continual cry. But the son was left desolate, and the two rooms were to be kept clean, the meals provided before he left for his work in the morning, and after his work at night; there was no one else to do it, and love for him called out new effort. With cane in one hand she treads the rooms back and forth, performing the household duties. Eyes undimmed, faculties unimpaired, she does what she can. Upon receiving a call a few months after the death of her daughter-in-law, she said--"You've brought me a whole pound of that nice tea! Well, honey, I asked the Lord for some good tea last night, and I knowed well enough it would be along some time to-day, cos He never keeps me waiting long. I found out why he took Mary instead of me; old as I was, I wasn't half so fit to go, and he was so full of mercy he let me stay long enough to see it! You know, honey, I've got no one to talk over old times with. There ain't none of 'em left that I was young with, and not many I was old with; but I'm never lonesome, for I'm too busy thinking of all the Lord's watching and waiting for me. I'm dreadful little use, but my son couldn't get along very well without me, and then I tell you I'm so busy thinking, I ain't got any time to be lazy or lonesome. Good many little things we want, too, and I have to be runnin' to the Lord for 'em."
"Do they come every time, auntie?", "Every single time, honey! He never fails, no matter who else does. He knows I don't ask for no nonsense; only for the things we really need, and he has promised them all the time." "But, are there not times, auntie, for instance, when your son is sick, when you cannot see where rent and food is coming from?" "Don't want to see, honey! What's the use seein'? Believin's the thing! Believin's better than money." And so, all the revolving months, this relic of the last century walks by faith in the unseen.