It was a sunny day in early spring. The snow and ice had begun to melt, crows were proclaiming in hoarse cries that winter would soon be gone and the woodpecker's tapping told out his joy at the prospect of summer's approach.
Mr. Watt and his son Jack had gone to the woods with the horses to drag some logs to the mill. The log pile was quite high and still covered with ice and snow. A number of the heavy birch logs had been rolled down for loading, and Mr. Watt was standing between two of them, his back to the pile and a foot up on one of the logs.
Suddenly, without warning, the logs began to slide, loosened from the ice that held them by the sun's warm rays. Jack shouted to his father to jump, but it was too late. With a sickening thud the logs rolled against one of the two between which Mr. Watt was standing, pinning his leg between them and breaking the bone.
Jack sprang over with a cant hook and released the injured man, laying him gently on the snow while he ran for the horses and a sled.
What were Mr. Watt's thoughts as he lay there in agony?
He afterward told a neighbor that, as he lay there, his whole life flashed before him. He saw himself a lost, guilty sinner bound for hell. The thought came to him that, had he been killed, he would have gone into a lost eternity. The agony he was enduring made him think of One who had borne the anguish of the cross. For the first time in his life he realized that those sufferings were for him.
As he lay there, he acknowledged that dying Man on the cross to be his Savior. It was not long before Jack returned with the sled, but in those few moments his father had passed "from death unto life," saved by believing in that work accomplished on the cross for him.
Later in the hospital he wept— not for his own sufferings, but for what his Lord endured for him when hanging on that shameful cross. "Oh, those spikes!" he would cry, "those cruel spikes!"
Has it ever touched your heart that Christ suffered, bled and died for you? Have you acknowledged that this sacrifice was for you?
Will you not, even now while it is salvation's day, accept this blessed Savior as yours?