At a fishing village on the Northumberland coast, one glorious summer day, I handed a Gospel tract to an old Scotch fisherman. He read the title, “A Friend in need is a Friend indeed,” and added, as his old face brightened into a smile, “Yes, and the best friend is Jesus.” I asked him how long he had known the Lord Jesus Christ as his Saviour. He told me, more than forty years. He said he had passed through stormy seas in that time, but the Lord had never failed him. As the tears began to roll down his rough cheeks I thought he must have a tale to tell, and so he had, and this was it: He said: We had four sons and we lost them all in two years. They were 28, 26, 24, and 21 years old, but they were all the Lord’s, and we shall meet them again.
When the last of them came to die, his mother and I were sorely troubled, and he said to me: “Father, you and mother look very down; what’s wrong with you?”
“Why,” I said, “my boy, we don’t like the thought of losing you; its that that makes us down.”
“But,” he replied, “you’re not going to lose me, dad. I belong to Jesus, and I’m going home, and you’ll come soon, and we’ll all be united again; but give me the hymn-book, and in sing a hymn to cheer you a bit.”
“You’re too weak to sing, my boy,” I said; but he at once replied, “Give me the book and let me try.”
And so the book was given to him, and he opened to that sweet hymn, and began to sing:
Jesus, lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly.”
He got through the first verse of it and then found that what his father had said was true—he was too weak to sing. So he pushed the book back again, and said, “You sing the next verse, father, and I’ll wave my hand to the tune.”
With halting notes, the father sang:
“Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee.”
And while the father sang, the dying lad, with a glad light on his wan face, waved his hand to the tune, but ere the father had finished the verse, that feeble hand fell, and the ransomed spirit rose to be with the One who had gilded his bed of death with light.
—From “Life After Death,” by J. J. M.