Tapping gently on the door and receiving no answer, Spring entered. On the long brick bed at one end of the room lay her sister. The wasted frame and racking cough told all too plainly Slave's days on earth were few. As Spring stood looking at her sister for a moment, almost too overcome to speak, she thought of her mother's words, "before it is too late."
For three days Spring remained with her sister. Fortunately for them both Slave's husband was not at home, and the old mother-in-law left them alone only too glad to have someone to relieve her from waiting on the sick one.
When Spring described to her sister their mother's beautiful death, tears ran down Slave's cheeks as she said, "Oh, that I too could have such a hope!"
"You can, my sister," eagerly cried Spring. "I have come as mother wished, to tell you how you can go to where she is." Then patiently and lovingly she opened up to her sister, step by step, the glorious Gospel of a Saviour from sin and a hope after death. Slave listened and drank in the message as one parched with thirst would drink from a living spring.
Once when the sisters were talking closely together, Slave suddenly broke into a passion of uncontrollable weeping. Then came little by little as she had strength to tell it, the story of those terrible years since she left her father's home. At last as if words failed her, she loosened her garment and revealed her shoulders and back covered with bruises and healed scars, silent witnesses to the cruelty of the past.
Gradually the Peace and Hope born of her new found faith came into Slave's poor starved soul. And as the sisters parted never as they knew well to meet again on earth, Slave said, "Yes, it is different now, I shall be in heaven before you. I have no more fear now. But pray for my husband."
* * *
There is a Love that longs with deep affection
To gather all the sinsick sons of men
Beneath its wings of shelter and protection,
And give them health again.
It is the love of Jesus, sweet with longing,
His full salvation to the world to give,
Crying to all the dead, earth's highways thronging,
"Come unto Me, come unto Me, and live."
By Annie Johnson Flint.
Copyright, Evangelical Publishers.
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