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In 1913,
when I was shepherding a little assembly of God's children in Lytham, Lancs.,
we held weekly open-air meetings on the promenade which runs along the sea
front. One evening during the service a little old woman, very uneducated and
extremely shy and retiring, suddenly broke out in peculiar staccato utterance
in an unknown tongue. Normally one would expect the crowd to laugh and mock,
but instead they seemed awed. When she had finished, to my surprise I was
given the interpretation, which I spoke our for all to hear. This obviously
moved the crowd. One man who had been a flourishing tailor in the town, but
had lost everything through drink, shouted out in agony of soul (he was
perfectly sober at the time), and coming into the ring of listeners he fell
on his knees and cried to God for salvation. |
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There was
a Japanese man in the crowd, and he went straight back to his landlady and asked:
‘Who are those people who preach near the lifeboat house?’ She replied that
we were a group of religious fanatics who tried to convert everybody to our
belief. |
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The
Japanese engineer declared: ‘They may be what you state, but a woman among
them spoke of Christ and His dying for us on a tree, in the best Japanese,
while a man gave the exact equivalent in English’. |
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Neither
Mrs. Whitehead, who spoke, nor I, who interpreted had had any contact with |
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W. F. P.
Burton |
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From: W.
F. P. Burton, Signs following, page
33-34 |