E.M. Bounds on Prayer is the biggest, fattest theology book I ever loved. I read through this book over the course of what must have been nearly a year. Every morning a few pages. It was wonderful.
I so treasure it when others record for posterity those precious, precious stories of answered prayer. I so easily forget that God hears and answers prayer. I need reminders like the ones author E.M. Bounds shares. He intersperses his teaching on prayer with stories of answered prayer at every turn -- both from the Bible as well as from contemporary life.
Please indulge me as I share just one...
"A water famine was threatened in Hakodate, Japan. Miss Dickerson, of the Methodist Episcopal Girls' School, saw the water supply getting smaller daily, and, in one of the fall months, appealed to the Board in New York for help. There was no money on hand, and nothing was done. Miss Dickerson inquired the cost of putting down an artesian well, but found the expense too great to be undertaken.
"One the evening of December 31, when the water was almost exhausted, the teachers and the older pupils met to pray for water, though they had no idea how their prayer was to be answered. A couple of days later, a letter was received in the New York office and it went something like this: "Philadelphia, January 1. It is six o'clock in the morning of New Year's Day. All the other members of the family are asleep, but I was awakened with a strange impression that someone, somewhere, is in need of money, which the Lord wants me to supply." Enclosed was a check for an amount that just covered the cost of the artesian well and the piping of the water into the school buildings."
I need stories like this. When the answered prayers of my own life seem to have faded into oblivion, and the only thing I can seem to remember is the sore spots that I'm currently praying for... I need those concrete reminders that the world is so much bigger than what I can see -- those reminders that there is something decidedly supernatural going on. We are living in an amazing universe that is saturated with spiritual goings-on. Stories like this take off the blinders for a few minutes.
--Jen