Old Annie was one whom many dreaded, and from whom all shrank. She had put in her twice seven years at hard labor and it was pretty well known that she had deserved each sentence. “The old jail bird,” some called her; no one would trust her—but yet she trusted her neighbors.
She kept a little basement shop in a poor street in a northern city; and when a woman was badly off she could get bread there, and the half-starved children of the neighborhood often got an apple or a cookie, and always a kind word, when they dared to go to her shop.
Girls who had been in prison found her friendship worth seeking when their time was out, but some of the neighbors wondered if it were real kindness that the woman showed to them or if she were still connected with thieves.
“Surely, wretched and outcast as she is, this woman is not to be dreaded, and feared, and shrunk from.” So thought a Christian woman one night as she passed Annie’s door on her way to a gospel meeting. The Lord put it in her heart to knock, and ask Annie if she would not go with her to the meeting.
The request was wholly unexpected but not unwelcome for the old convict said: “Yes, I’ll go!” And she went, holding the arm and guiding the almost blind old Christian who had invited her.
When they reached the room where the service was held they were late and a hymn was being sung: “We know there’s a bright and a glorious home
Away in the heavens high,
Where all the redeemed shall with Jesus dwell—
But will you be there and I?”
Years and years had passed since the old convict had heard the gospel. She had given up all thought of ever being in this glorious home. It was no place for such as she! Jail birds, she fancied, could expect nothing but another long imprisonment—how long she knew not. When she had heard her first sentence, she had fainted away. Her second sentence had made her shriek with horror.
Sometimes now the fear of hearing a sentence to everlasting punishment made her blood run cold. But what could she do now?
Her life had been lived. And such a life!
She would not wish her greatest enemy to live through what she had experienced!
The chorus of the hymn, with its oft-repeated question, “Will you be there?” got a firm hold of her unmusical old ear. The question reached a heart long dead to such thoughts.
A gospel address followed, and the old convict went home with one thought filling her heart—the great possibility of even such an one as she being among Christ’s redeemed and sharing that home in glory.
She knew all avoided and hated her. Could it be possible that God loved her—that Jesus had died for her?
Days and nights of mingled hope and fear followed. She could not tell anyone what was passing in her mind. She hesitated to tell to anyone all that her life had been. To whom could she—go she who had never found a friend on earth to sympathize with her? She felt increasingly that she was shut up to God, but she dared not approach Him. The sense of her guilt increased as she thought of His holiness and righteousness.
Glimpses of His love came now and then as she remembered the meeting and as she thought of the cross of Christ.
At last her burden became too heavy. With a broken heart she threw herself with all her sin at the feet of the Lord Jesus. There she found, to her surprise, that He was both able and willing to save and bless her.
Full of joy and thankfulness, she could not keep silent: she had found life and peace in Jesus, and tell it to someone she must.
She again sought the room where she had heard of the love of Christ and, taking the hands of the preacher, she first told what the Lord had done for her. Referring to herself and her past life she said, “He took me from a fearful pit.”
Years have passed. In the dear, gentle old Christian woman, ready for any act of kindness and love, one has ceased to see, even for a moment, the old convict. In God’s view she is His child, washed in the blood of the Lamb “accepted in the beloved.”
“From every station of life they come, To raise the anthem high Of ‘Worthy the Lamb that once was slain!’
But will you be there and I?”