ASK and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.
How simple, how rich with meaning are these promises of the Lord Jesus! and no conditions are attached to their fulfilment, except this, that the asker lay his request before the Lord with simple and childlike faith.
He who so asks will experience that the Lord answers his supplication, even if, in many cases, differently from what he expected.
O how many glorious answers we would have to our prayers if we would ask in more childlike simplicity and confiding trust.
Mary was a little girl of ten years who lived with her grandparents and both of them knew the Lord Jesus and had instructed their little granddaughter to take heed to her soul’s salvation. Often had they told her of Jesus and His readiness to answer our requests.
Well, one day, the teacher at the close of the lesson said, “For tomorrow the lesson will be on page—of your arithmetic.”
All wrote down the number of the page in their note books, and then with gladness hurried home.
Mary’s grandparents lived not far from the school. When she reached home and had finished her supper, she took down her arithmetic, and note book to work at her lesson, but how frightened she was when on looking at the page assigned by the teacher as the next day’s lesson, she found it was so poorly printed that not a single problem could be clearly read.
Now good counsel was needful! No one in her class, to whom she could go, lived near her, and the teacher was very strict. She was much troubled and at last began to cry, for what was to happen the next day? She was afraid of being severely punished. At this moment, her grandfather entered the room and seeing her cry, he asked the cause of her grief. Mary told him her difficulty. The grandfather looked at her quietly and then said, “Just tell Jesus! He can help you. It is an easy matter to Him!”
Mary looked at her grandfather with surprise, for how could the Lord Jesus be able to help her? but when she saw that the old man was serious in his advice, she went to the next room and asked the Lord to help her to get her lesson done, as she did not know what to do.
After the prayer she was comforted a little, but she was not yet quite confident. At last she went out into the garden, which was quite near the school house. She had not been there long when her eyes fell on a page of paper, which, crumpled up like a ball, hung on the hedge. Not thinking much about it, she picked it up and smoothed it out.
Who could describe her astonishment, when she saw that it was the very page she must have, and the print not unreadable, as in her arithmetic, but clear and distinct. With delight she hastened into the house and showed the paper to her grandparents.
When they understood the case, they kneeled down with her and thanked the Lord for having answered her request so quickly and in such a wonderful way. Then Mary worked her lesson, and I need hardly say, that this time she did it specially quick.
Mary is no longer a child. She lives no longer with her grandparents, but has a home of her own, but this remarkable answer to prayer in her childhood days, she has never forgotten. The remembrance of it in her later years has been useful and blessed, and she has told me the account so that I might tell it again to the young and old readers of “Messages of Love”, for their encouragement and blessing.
ML 01/21/1912