As we approach upcoming graduations, and also Mother’s Day (May 9), I think about the power of prayer. For just one child to successfully grow to adulthood and make it to graduation, how many prayers were said by mothers and grand-mothers and numerous other relatives? The answer must be staggeringly high.
Considering the many obstacles our children manage to overcome, and the number of times we and they make it through to the other side of situations, there is much reason to be thankful to God and to believe in the great power of prayer.
Maybe that’s why people are drawn to the words of the song, “Amazing Grace.” It was the result of one man’s urgent prayer – John Newton. Considering John’s ability to get into trouble, his mother must have said many prayers for him.
When John was 11, his father – a master of a ship in the Mediterranean trade – took the boy on board. This early training provided excellent groundwork for John’s next major seafaring experience, drafted into the British Navy.
Still in his teens, John received permission to sail on the H.M.S. Harwich, bound for the African coast. By now, the unsettled and impatient youth was emerging as the rotten apple in the barrel. Mocking authority, he chose his friends unwisely and “sank to the depths of vice.”
In Africa, John fell into the service of a slave dealer. This was in the late 1700s, and slave trade began to fascinate John as a lucrative livelihood, but before knew it, he was put to work on the dealer’s plantation laboring with the other slaves.
At 21, John escaped. Hopping an outbound ship called the Greyhound, he immediately returned to the ways of his troubled teen years. Associating with the lowest of crew members, John ridiculed the upright seamen in his company, ridiculed the ship’s captain – even ridiculed the book he had found on board, a book entitled The Imitation of Christ. Clearly, he remembered joking about that book.
That night the Greyhound sailed into a violent storm. John awakened to discover his cabin filled with seawater. The ship’s side had caved in and the Greyhound was going down. Ordinarily such damage would send a ship to the bottom within a few minutes. In this case, the Greyhound’s buoyant cargo bought a few hours of precious time.
After 9 hours at the pumps, John overheard a desperate remark from one of the crew. They were all goners, he said.
And almost in answer, John – unwittingly and for the first time in his life – prayed: “If this will not do, the Lord have mercy on us!”
The record shows that the Greyhound did not go down.
After that, each year, John Newton observed the anniversary of that most significant incident with prayer and fasting. In a very real sense, he observed it throughout each remaining day of his life. John retired from the sea to become a minister. Also a writer of verse.
And the immortal words of a wayward boy turned good are celebrated to this day: “Amazing Grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see!”
See you in church,
Terry