FIELDS! World-wide fields! Fields, white unto harvest!
\ the Word of God as a sickle, was about to enter the fields as Ruth of old.
My hostess met me and we started toward her home
Mount Forest was a small farming town, rather quaint in some respects, The one and only business street consisted of the usual small-town general store, barber shop, bank, grocery, and so forth. Between the bank and the printing establishment was the mission. It had formerly been a small store. As I stepped inside, I saw only a dozen chairs before a tiny platform “A doll’s church,” I thought. That afternoon, I worked diligently in my room, rather excitedly, preparing the first sermon of my first campaign!
That night I preached to a small congregation, quite too small to fill even the chairs that were there. But I labored just as earnestly over that handful of people as I did |: ked auditoriums.
Came the following night, and with it came the same handful of people; and again the third night they were there!
W-where is the rest of your congregation?” I asked hy, this is the congregation,” my hostess replied; there is.”
rin pa you been preaching to them?” was my
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“More than a year.”
I concluded her congregation had been “preached uy
“Well, I'm going out to get a crowd,” I told her, picking up a little chair and starting out the doo:
"How are you going to get them in?” she asked, anxiously.
“I don’t know, exactly, but I can’t see any reason for preaching to a few people when we might just as well have a crowd!”
So I set forth in quest of a new congregation, with no ideas as to how I should go about finding it!
Coming to the main corner of the town, just a block from the hall, I set the chair down and used it for a rostrum.
I stood an instant upon it, undecided as to what to do next.
"When in doubt, pray,” was my first thought.
Lifting my arms, I closed my eyes and prayed silently.
Almost instantly I heard approaching footsteps, then voices.
“What's the matter with her?”
“Dunno!”
“Reckon she’s sick er sumthin?”
“May be a cataleptic state.”
“What kind of a state?”
“Cataleptic; sorta’ unconscious-like!”
“Oh; think so?”
“Sure.”
Discussion waxed louder, and the crowd grew in numbers.
‘At length a curious finger poked me to settle the “cataleptic state” argument, and I opened my eyes quickly.
There was my crowd!
Jumping down from the chair, I exclaimed:
“Quick! Quick! Come with me!”
Chair in hand, I fairly flew up the street, with the wondering crowd trailing close behind. Into the mission hall I sped, warning the usher as I hurried to the platform:
“As soon as the place is full, shut the doors; don’t let anyone out!”
I launched at once into my sermon, and I'm happy to say, no one tried to leave.
Early the next evening the little hall was filled to capacity, and it was apparent that many were going to be turned away.
Wishing I had money enough to rent the big town hall, I began to think of some way to obtain it. The more I thought, the more my chances for the move diminished.
Finally I turned to what I had in hand, and decided on the big tree-studded lawn that sloped from the lady’s piazza to the rear of the hall. Appealing to the farmers for their lanterns, we soon had a string of lights about the piazza and the lawn, and there we held our church service that night!
Big, broad-shouldered farmers came down to the improvised altar and gave their hearts to the Lord, That mecting and those which followed on succeeding nights were glorious! The power of God fell, and scores were saved
At the end of my first week I was reminded that I had taken no collection.
The next night, I timidly took one. It was sixty-five dollars. I sat up almost all night watching it, I was so proud of it!
The money had been given to me, for my own personal needs, but I felt the Lord's work needed it far more than I, and hearing of a man who had a used tent for sale, I made my way to the next town where he resided.
He wanted quite a bit more than my sixty-five dollars for his tent but, finally, convinced that I had no more than that, concluded:
“Well, you can have it, if you won't put me to the trouble of taking it out of the bag.”
When I had taken it out, I discovered that the poor tent was a sieve; mildewed, torn and motheaten!
I wasn’t much of a business woman then, and my stewardship when I purchased that tent wasn't any too brilliant. Of course when the man showed me a bag and told me the tent inside it was in the best of condition, I simply believed him I'm afraid I've always been too trusting of others—sometimes much to my own disadvantage!
Friends fell to with a will, and we sewed and patched until the tent appeared in fairly decent shape. But, braced up here, it would lop over there; propped there, it would sag wearily here!
At last it was up, and we had to admit that it didn’t look too badly with the bright mottoes, which we had painted, fastened to the canvas walls.
Right in the middle of the first meeting held in the tent, just as I was getting nicely into my sermon, a little wind sprang up. It was too much for the decrepit old piece of canvas.
It sighed, gave a shrill shriek and started to split!
Down the poles the heavy top began to slip and slide, slip and slide.
Eeek—squeeke—r-r-rip!
It seemed as though I would just naturally collapse too! The breath seemed to be oozing right out of me, exactly as it was out of the inside of the tent! There was I, intent upon my message, with a good audience listening attentively—and here was the roof collapsing over our heads!
So startled was I that I just stood there, rooted to the spot, staring at the billowing folds. My mouth was open, but no words came forth!
Scarcely realizing what I was about to do, I instinctively lifted my arm, pointed to the tent top, and cried:
“In the name of the Lord, I command you to stay there till the meeting is over!”
Believe it or not, that tent caught on a protruding nail and stayed!
After the mecting was over, we took the tent down and spread it on the ground. The next day I again took the big needle, got a group of women from the congregation to help me, and worked all morning and afternoon sewing yards and yards of canvas, dozens of bolt ropes, spreaders and guys all over the tent.
By the time evening came, the tent resembled an old inner tube, all covered with patches—so many patches that there seemed to be very little of the original tent left! Finally we pitched it again, this time to stay.
When we had finished, every muscle in my body ached. 1 was so tired and exhausted that I felt unable to go ahead with the evening service as scheduled. Surely, I thought, nobody would expect me to preach, after such a day as that! So I determined to rest that night, and pinned a note to the tent postponing the meeting until the following night.
Preparatory to retiring, I took my Bible and knelt down for a season of prayer and study. The Bible somehow slipped from the bed to the floor, and there it opened of its own accord, I picked it up, and, as I did so, the first words to greet my eyes were:
“He that saveth his life shall lose it, but he that loseth his life for My sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.”
I preached that night! I changed into my uniform and, though dead tired, when I stepped upon the platform and we sang the first hymn, all my weariness dropped from me as a cloak unclasped and thrown aside!
At that particular service, which I had so nearly foregone, eighteen of those big, broad-shouldered farmers were converted! God rewarded me in a blessed way for my determina tion and sacrifice.
The meeting went along gloriously, continually increasing in power, in numbers, and in results at the altars, where the lives of men and women were transformed from darkness into light.
From the greatest to the least, from city officials and the best families to the most hopeless sinner, who in this instance seemed to be the town bell-ringer, the effects of this revival reached.
The town bell-ringer was a novel character and seemed to be the football of everyone in his drunkenness; kicked out of saloons, earning his pittance by ringing his bell up and down the street
“Hear ye! H-e-a-r ye!” he would cry loudly, announcing an auction sale, a theatre or a ball game.
In one of our meetings a marvelous transformation was wrought in his life and, sobered and dressed in a freshly cleaned and mended suit, he proudly strode up and down the streets ringing his bell more loudly than ever after that!
“Hear ye! Hear ye! I have given my heart to Christ. Come down to the revival tonight and hear Sister McPherson preach about the Christ Who saved even me!”” * For the two years immediately following those Mount Forest meetings, in summer and in winter, north and south, I worked by day and dreamed by night in the shadow of a tent. I watched my precious tents as a mother watches her only child;
I could not bear to be out of sight of them. They were the entire world wherein I lived, breathed, and had my being. I slept on a soldier's canvas cot in a little tent beside the big one, myself and my two children; and as I slept, I sometimes stroked the sides of the cot and thought that I, too, was a soldier, bivouacked upon the battleground of the Lord!
E It would be quite impossible to detail all the vicissitudes which befell and all the glorious revivals which were held in those tents. We traveled thousands of miles together, from hamlet to town and from town to city, and thousands of souls found the golden stairs within canvas walls!
Sometimes, when the wind howled and the sleet came slanting-wise in sheets, I would have to stay up from dusk to dawn with a sledgehammer in my hand, driving in stakes as fast as the straining guys loosened them in the ground; and sometimes, after the meeting, would sit staring into the heart of a dying camp fire, alone under the stars with the palm-fronds whispering their lullaby, seeking to read in the flow of the embers a message for the morrow.
The Lord wonderfully blessed and supplied my every need and the needs of my two children for food, clothing and traveling expenses. We lacked no good thing.