There is a hospital for little children in Edinburgh, and a preacher, with a very busy schedule, goes one afternoon every week and sits down and talks with those little children — a good many of them there for life; they are incurable. One day he found a little boy, only six years old, who had been brought over from Fife. The little fellow was in great distress because the doctors were coming to take off his leg. Think how you would feel if you had a little brother six years old and he was taken off to the hospital, and the doctor said that he was coming forty-eight hours afterward to take off his leg!
Well, that preacher tried to comfort the boy, and said, “Your father will come to be with you.”
“No,” he said. “My father is dead; he cannot be here.”
“Well, your mother will come.”
“My mother is over in Fife. She is sick and cannot come.”
The preacher himself could not come, so he said, “Well, you know the matron here is a mother; she has got a great big heart.”
The little chin began to quiver as the boy said, “Perhaps Jesus will be with me.”
Do you have any doubt of it? Next Friday the man of God went to the hospital, but he found the cot was empty. The poor boy was gone; the Saviour had come and taken him to His bosom.
One little act of kindness will often live a good deal longer than a most magnificent sermon.