“Jesus Bids Us Shine”
This large family lived about equi-distant from four towns on a quiet inaccessible rented farm along the river. It was while I was visiting the country school that I first got acquainted with some of the children. They told me about their youngest sister, who had had infantile paralysis. After getting rather minute directions from the older brother, I finally found the isolated farm home.
Alice was five years old and as bright and as ardent a little child as I ever knew. She was very easy to make friends with and I soon began to teach her the first verse of the children’s song, “Jesus Bids Us Shine.” When I came to the line, “You in your small corner, and I in mine,” I would point first at her and then at myself. She got a great “kick” out of this and set herself to learn the words and the tune. I visited with the older folks a while, went out to the barn with the farmer to look at his stock, ate dinner with the family, but in between times I kept trying to teach little Alice the first verse of that song. Finally she could sing it with the assistance of her older sister.
About a year later I went out to the Anderson home but found that Alice had been taken for treatment to the children’s hospital at the University. I went back a year later, and this time I found that an ambulance had come after her that very morning. Perhaps six months later, I was again slowly taking the deeply-rutted road. She came limping toward me as fast as she could, which was not very fast. Hobbling down the lane on her one good leg with the aid of a considerably improved other leg, she called out to me with ardent pride, “I can sing that song. I can sing that song!”
And she could:
“Jesus bids us shine, with a clear pure light,
Like a little candle burning in the night;
In this world of darkness, we must shine,
You in your small corner, and I in mine.”
And she didn’t forget to point at me either!
—Otis Moore in Zion’s Herald.