“Then said the Lord, ‘O world of care,
So blinded and beguiled,
Thou must receive for thy repair
A Holy Child.’”[119]
The Children of Tunis are Worth Helping
QUOTATIONS
PRAYING CHILDREN IN KOREA
Sometimes little children learn about Jesus in some way and become Christians before their parents do. Three years ago, after a meeting in the country at a place called Top Chai, in Korea, two small boys, each nine years old, came up and told me that they were friends and had been believing in Jesus for a year, but that none of their parents had been Christians. They said, “We want you to pray every day with us that our parents may believe in Jesus.” I wrote their names in a little book and did pray as they asked me to, and every time I met the boys after that I would ask if their parents had become Christians yet. “No,” they would say, “not yet, but they are going to.” Last spring, just before I left Korea, I went to Top Chai to say good-bye, and one of the boys came to me with the brightest smile you ever saw and said, “My father has been sick for a long time but is better now, and has promised to come to church just as soon as he is able.” And back of him stood the other boy holding a smaller boy by the hand. “Pastor,” he said, “this is my younger brother, who has become a Christian, and my father has been coming to church all winter.”
A bright, manly little fellow in my church in Pyeng Yang had been a Christian only about a year when he succeeded in getting his mother to come to church with him. Soon after the mother decided to be a Christian, this boy became very sick and his mother was very angry at God about it. “See,” she said, “this is what I get for being a Christian.” He plead with her not to feel that way about it, and tried to get her to pray with him; but she refused, saying, “I will never pray again.” One day, just before he died, he held out his hands to her, saying, “Mother, come pray with me now,” but she turned her face away and sat down in a corner, and he began praying alone in Korean, “Hanale Kai sin, uri abage,” “Our Father who art in Heaven,” and, as he was praying, he died. The next day his poor mother came to our house and told my wife all about it and cried as if her heart would break because she had let him die without praying with him. I think God will let this boy know in some way in heaven that his mother did repent after he went away. (W. N. Blair, The Foreign Post, May, 1910.)