HERE are some berry pickers at work in a strawberry patch. A dear Christian man has come to bring them the glad tidings of the gospel. It is a fine thing to let our light shine and speak about our Saviour wherever we are.
I would like to tell you about a girl named Ann who did this in a berry patch near the foothills of Puyallup. The blackberry season was over, and all the rest of the workers had left. Only Ann and her sister were there, going over the scratchy blackberry patch. They pulled long stockings over their arms with little holes cut in the toes for their fingers to stick through, but even so it was scratchy work.
Sis was already going down to the shed with a carrier full of berries, while Ann still had a box and a half to go before hers would be ready. She never could figure out how anyone could pick so fast and still clean the bushes. It was quiet there away from the noise of the cars on the highway. The chattering of a chipmunk, an occasional bird call, and sounds from the distant logging camp were all that broke the stillness.
Gingerly she unsnagged a branch that had caught in her hair, then reached for a stem fairly loaded with dark purple berries. At that very moment a well-aimed berry hit her square on the back of her neck.
“All right, Sis!” But then she remembered Sis was down unloading at the shed. She almost got snagged again in the same branch as she whirled about. There stood the biggest man she had ever seen! Perhaps he wasn’t, but she was almost petrified at finding herself face to face with a total stranger.
He had a friendly smile. “Sorry I gave you such a start. I just walked toward town from the logging camp and here’s what I ran into.” He sampled a few berries from a bush. She still hadn’t recovered her power of speech.
“My rigger broke down; they have to splice a cable, so I have time on my hands,” he said as he flipped a few more berries into his mouth. He was a young man and she didn’t doubt his story, but what should she say to him?
She found words at last. “Do you know the Lord Jesus as your personal Saviour?”
“No,” he replied with an amused smile.
“Well, you really should, because we don’t know when the Lord’s coming and we should be ready to meet Him.”
“I suppose so.”
“Why don’t you go to the tent meeting tonight? Maybe you will get saved.”
“Maybe I might.”
“It’s at 7:30.”
“All right, it’s a promise, but I’ll have to go now. Bye!”
“Good-by.” He disappeared as quickly as he had come. Sis could hardly believe that Ann had really had a visitor.
That night after practically everyone was seated in the big tent, and the singing had begun, a tall young lumberjack ducked his head to enter the tent and quietly took a back seat. Ann silently prayed for him.
The speaker opened with the verse, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” To illustrate it, he read from Genesis of how Jacob deceived his aged father to get the blessing that his father intended to give his brother Esau. In later years Jacob himself was deceived, first by his father-in-law’s giving him the wrong wife. But that was only part of the reaping. Later, when he was old, his sons deceived him by dipping the coat of his dearly loved son Joseph in the blood of a kid so that he might think a wild animal had slain him. He went on to say that if we reject God’s offer of mercy now, in that coming day, He will refuse us an entrance into heaven. But if we sow in faith, accepting Christ as our Saviour, we shall reap the reward of faith, which is heaven and an eternity with Christ.
Ann was not present the next evening, having gone to bed early, but she did not forget to pray for the young lumberjack. That night about nine-thirty, she was awakened by the chugging sound of an old model T heading up toward the lumber camp. Suddenly it stopped right on the hillside road going past the pickers’ camp. Two voices in rich harmony rang out joyfully in the night air, “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.” Ann recognized the voice of one of them, though she never saw him again. When the last note of the hymn was finished the car sputtered into motion and was gone.
Suddenly she wondered, “Perhaps there had even been fruit for eternity out in that berry patch.”
Messages of God’s Love 11/20/1955