an example his dad had set. Every child hungers for love. In our home town a father and a mother were constantly quarrelling. Finally they decided to separate. The mother be came enamoured of another man. In her sinfulness she decided to abandon her husband and four children. Her husband said, “Sweetheart, I love you. I want you to stay with the children.” She said, “No, I don’t love you, and I don’t want any of you any more.” His natural question was, “Well, what can I do for the children? How can I pro vide for them? I can’t stay at home. They need a mother.” She didn’t care. She abandoned them all. The youngest was a little boy only a few months old. The father, not wanting to give up his children for adoption, decided he would put them in foster homes. This little lad was taken by a godly Chris tian family. There they loved him and he came to think of them as his real father and mother. He lived there for something over four years. Then the father decided that he would remarry. He began to collect his children from foster homes. But now, the real mother jealously came back into the picture. She insisted on having the right of taking the children at least part of the time. By some strange miscarriage of justice she was given the privilege. The little lad was badgered between his own mother who had abandoned him and his new step mother. His fos ter mother, whom he counted as his real mother, was never seen. He lan guished and became weaker and weak er. Finally he was hospitalized and died. One of the medical men said to me, “We had an autopsy and the only thing we could sort out was that this little child died of a broken heart. He no longer wanted to live.” In a hospital in New York City they have some young men and women whose chief function it is just to love the sick boys and girls. They are not there to give injections or to carry on any kind of medical care. Their one and only job is love. An. interesting thing took place in one of our local courts. There was a 9
Chapter Five W hile flying to speak at a Boston college I selected Luke’s gospel as a study for my devotions. A passage struck my eye concerning Zacharias and the birth of John the Baptist. He, of course, was the forerunner of our Saviour, preaching the baptism of re pentance and salvation. In speaking of John’s -purpose in coming, the Scrip ture states that one of his ‘ministries was “to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to walk in the wisdom of the just.” The last two verses of Malachi declare, “Behold, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” The real hunger in every human soul is for love. The Lord has made us this way. There are hearts hungry for the love of a father and mother and for the fellowship of a real home. We are restless until we find this because it is a foretaste of the love of God manifest in Jesus Christ and through the life and soul of a human being. The Bibli cal concept of parenthood is not that the father and the mother are purely responsible for the life of the child but that the parents are to be guides and overseers to bless, love and direct the lives of their children. One of the students at Bethel College, in St. Paul, was going out in the sum mer to reach the lives of some of the young people in his home town. He sought to cultivate their friendship by playing baseball with them. Then he began to talk to them about the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour. He spoke of the real meaning of the love of Christ in their lives. He told them about God, our heavenly Father. One boy’s face clouded and out of the deep trouble of his soul he said, “What did you say? If God is anything like my old man, you can keep Him!” What
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