Part 10 - Caring For Family

I used to wonder when a boy, leaving for school on a cold Monday morning, how my mother could manicure her fingernails at the old-fashioned rub board at the west porch with the fire burning around the old wash pot and the weather so cold that sometimes the clothes would freeze on the line. And yet, she was singing, "Sweet hour of prayer that calls me from a world of care," and "What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear, what a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer" But during these last thirty-five years, I've found out what she was singing about.

Not till my dying day will I forget the visit of a young man to my study a few years ago as he poured out his troubles and sorrows. He had an invalid mother that he cared for and would go home noons and prepare her meals and then rush back to his job to make a living. His brother was on the seventh floor of Memorial Hospital and he was given orders by the doctors to drive him to San Antonio to the home for the insane. He had to break the news to his brother and make that lonely trip with him.

And then, the young lady that he was going with and that he loved had a mother and daddy who did not want this young man to go with their daughter and became very bitter and ugly and he felt it best to give her up. And he gave this word before we prayed and he left,

"I walked a mile with pleasure,
She chattered all the way;
But none was I the wiser
For all she had to say.

"I walked a mile with sorrow;
Not a word said she;
But, oh, the lessons she taught me
As sorrow walked with me."

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