Northern Ontario in winter can be a cold, white world. Little, widely-scattered settlements are separated by miles of frozen lakes and forest. The only roads are century-old trails connecting the water routes. Who could ever forget the smoke of each cabin rising into the still, frosty air catching the light of the fading sunset?
Oil lamps begin flickering, doors open and figures step out in the vanishing light to pick up an armload of firewood for the night. Voices are heard and their tones are mixed-some happy, some sad-for pain and sorrow are the lot of all mankind.
It was to several such settings that an Indian brother in the Lord and I had flown in January, 1967. Sometimes a few days can seem like weeks and that trip was one of those times. We held gospel services at the villages and were on our way home when the weather took a turn for the worse.
My friend had a wife and baby waiting in his village and I had a family waiting for me, so we were both a little homesick. We were 80 miles from my friend’s village when the weather made it impossible to go on. I searched the chart for a settlement within our fuel range. Upon locating one, I turned the plane in that direction.
By the time we landed and had secured the aircraft, a full-fledged blizzard was beginning to blow. That night, after the storm, the temperature dropped to 40 degrees below zero! In a sheltered area we built a fire, ate and unrolled our sleeping bags. My mind was filled with questions: “Where will we get fuel to fly on? What am I doing here when I could be somewhere else preaching to crowds? What if we cannot get out? or get sick? There’s not a phone or a doctor within 360 miles of here!”
Then I checked myself. “I am a child of God,” I thought and remembered the words of Paul to the church at Thessalonica. “In everything give thanks,” he had said: “for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you” (1 Thess. 5:1818In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. (1 Thessalonians 5:18)). Just then my fellow laborer said we should try to hold a service in the village.
Moments later, we pushed open a cabin door. There sat the oldest Indian woman I had ever seen. She was alone and blind. We proceeded with the “service” and explained the gospel of God’s grace to our “audience” of one. Two hours later she had received Jesus Christ through faith in Him, and the three of us began to sing:
“Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”
We learned that she had heard about the gospel before the turn of the century from a traveler and that all those years she had longed to hear more. God had granted two men—one white, one Indian—the privilege of finishing that story of hope which had been begun so many years before! Her loneliness, blindness and poverty, mixed with misery and guilt, were intensified that night by the fury of a white blizzard.
But my friend and I knew that the God of heaven and earth had sent that storm to change the course of a little airplane with two preachers aboard and brought us to the very village, to the very cabin, where He, from before the foundation of the world, had chosen to save the soul of a dear Indian woman who had waited 70 years.
ML-05/28/1978