Canoe In the Center of the Current

Canoe In the Center of the Current

by Glenn Clark

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

A woman asked me for prayer in a letter and she’s enclosed a five dollar bill. I didn’t want to use the trite expression after I told her I’d pray for her and use that money for the kingdom work. So I just thanked her at the end for the portrait of Abraham Lincoln that she’d sent me.

A week later I received a naive little letter saying, “I didn’t send you a picture of Abraham Lincoln, I sent you a five dollar bill.” So I had to write her another letter to tell her to look at the five dollar bill someday and see the portrait that was on it. All these signs some have been carrying around reminds me of a Jewish merchant who had a shop in a Catholic neighborhood and his business was quite poor. And someone said if you attend mass a few times it would improve your business. So he attended a mass but when he came home he looks so puzzled, his wife said, “What did they do?” “A man came in long robes and he sang out, ‘I bet I beat you at dominoes, I bet I beat you at dominoes.’ And then they went around and collected the bets.”

But the money you put into the scholarship fund revealed that you’re betting that God is going to take hold of some new lives. This morning I wanted to tell you how I got started. Some have been wanting to know and some have heard me tell this because it’s my acres of diamonds talk. Conwell gave an address on the acres of diamonds. He gave it a thousand times. The free will offering of each mass with that multitude that came amounted to a thousand dollars each time. And he put a thousand boys, they used them for scholarships, a thousand boys through college. How many of you ever heard the Acres of Diamonds address of Conwell? Or how many of you read it? Well, this address I’m going to give is what affected my life. More than the acres of diamonds did his life. And it has reached a great many people, so I think you’ll be willing to… even if you’ve heard it before.

Thirty years ago I decided to take Jesus at His word. When He said seven times, repeated it, “Whatsoever you ask in My name will be done.” Can I just excuse me please. I have a… Mr. Ford… So I decided to take the lesson that Jesus gave in prayer. His little Lord’s Prayer. I was going to take a year to learn how to pray the Lord’s Prayer. And I discovered that it takes thirty seconds to recite the Lord’s Prayer. And it has taken me thirty years to experience it in all its fullness. In the first place I discovered one little phrase that I decided would take a whole year to learn how to pray. To pray correctly. “Thy kingdom come, and Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.” Thy kingdom come. And… Now when you pray, and ask the Lord for something, you expect it to come to pass. When my wife had ordered groceries, they always came. When Helen May was three years old, I often would go up and tuck her in bed in her little crib and hear her say her prayers. And one night she said, “I want to say my prayers differently tonight, Daddy.” And so I said, “All right, don’t look.” So I turned my back, but I presently did peek because it was the most unusual prayer.

She had her hand to her ear like a telephone receiver. She said, “Dear Jesus, give me God. Please, God, send down a nice day tomorrow and make me a nice girl and make Mama happy. And goodbye.” Just like you’d say over a phone. Well, her theology is very correct. You talk to Jesus, He is the operator.

And the mediator in between, He’ll come make the connection for you. In His name. And she had found that whatever her mother ordered came to pass and she just thought she’d use an efficient method. Well, when I asked every morning then, starting the day, “Thy kingdom come on earth and in earth as it is in heaven,” I began to look out each day to see the kingdom. And I made a most glorious discovery, which I’ve been exploring in the last thirty years. I touch on it at different points in my new book, Windows of Heaven. I made a discovery, which I’m going to announce to you. When you die and go into heaven, you’ll discover three things. First place, you’ll be with the persons you want to be with when you want to be with them. And they’ll want to be with you at that identical moment. In the second place, ideas will come to you in perfect sequence and perfect order. Just the ideas that’ll bring inspiration and happiness or help to those that you’re with. In the third place, the supply resides in the need. And whenever there’s a real need, the supply is there, just as the answer resides in the question and the fulfillment in the dream. Now, when you step out on a thing like that, you’re stepping out with a great big supposition.

You’re really stepping out and people might say that’s the height of impractability. But if you go all the way, you’ll begin to find that you become an irresistible person. You’ll begin to find that you’re working in line with the tides of the universe. When I fall in the river and get caught up in a whirlpool, I might whirl around and around and around. But if I swim out to the center of the current, or rather, let’s suppose this might seem laborious as swimming. Let’s suppose if you get in the canoe and you get in the current, and you say, “I’m going to go somewhere without any paddling, with a minimum amount of effort. I’m going to let the tides of the universe carry me.” You get in there in a whirlpool. That means you’re in yourself. You never get anywhere. You have to make some effort to get out into the current. But when you get in the center of the current, you can just fix your pillow and lie down and take a nap. And when you wake up, you’ll be reaching the great ocean. You will have reached your goal. Now, it may seem lazy, but there’s a lot of effort needed to get out of the whirlpools of self. And that’s what the purpose of the morning meditation is.

And then into the stream of God, and then you can let go. And so, I began to find myself, the people I wanted to be with, when I wanted to be with them. When I was a little boy, my mother was telling me a story, and I was in heaven because I was getting just the ideas I wanted. I was with a person I wanted to be with, and she wanted to be with me. And then a knock on the door, and Mrs. Beaner came in. Mrs. Beaner lived down at the end of the block, and nobody liked Mrs. Beaner, especially boys. Mother had stopped the story and I felt very miserable about it. I wasn’t a bit polite. Mother wasn’t very cordial herself. When Mrs. Beaner came to leave, and her name fitted her perfectly, that’s a real name, as perfectly as if Dickens had given it to her.

Mother thought she’d make amends for her cool reception and she said, “Can’t you stay a little longer? You have to hurry away.” And then she said, “If you insist.” And then I learned that hell is to be with a person you don’t want to be with when she doesn’t want to be with you. When I went to Grinnell College, I sat back on the boys’ side and watched the boys come in, but chiefly I watched the girls come in. And I noticed a very pretty, very sweet-faced girl. You might not put her down as a candidate for Miss America, but she was, to my opinion, a very sweet-faced girl. Came over and sat back there among the junior academy, and I was the senior academy on this side.

And I went to chapel regularly, get there early enough to watch her come in and stay long enough to watch her go out. But I didn’t get the courage to introduce myself. Some weeks later, the literary society I had joined, the Boys’ Society, planned to give a party to the girls’ sister society. And they had a unique way of dividing, pairing off. I would recommend that to any young group. They put the names of all the girls on the blackboard, and then the boys drew numbers, and the one that drew number one could go up and scratch out his choice. I maneuvered to get number one. The next evening, I discovered where she lived in the little city, and then I walked around the block five times, and then I did a deed that deserves to rank with the exploits of Horatio at the bridge, Charlotte Corday, and the charge of the light brigade. I went up and I rang the bell.

She let me in person. I was nonplussed. I was speechless. I followed her into the library. I sat down, she sat down, she sat down, and I sat down, and I twirled my hat, and finally got out what I’d come for, and she stared at me. She’d never seen me on highway or on the lawn. She, the only way she could go, though, was to accept it. And, so she finally accepted. She didn’t seem to be especially anxious to be with me. I was very anxious to be with her. That wasn’t exactly heaven, that wasn’t exactly hell, that was just purgatory.

But after I’d graduated from the college, and I got a master’s degree at Harvard, and cycled through Europe, I came back to that campus one summer. She had now graduated. We walked across that beautiful campus, and there, under the great elms, we made a great discovery. That I wanted to be with her, and she wanted to be with me, and that was heaven. And we have remained in heaven ever since. After thirty happy years of married life, she actually stepped through that thin partition that separates this earth with heaven. But we had been living in the spirit of heaven, so the shock was not so great. Folks, I can’t explain this. I just possibly can’t explain it. But if you can live in the spirit of heaven with your loved ones, you’ll find when they step into heaven somehow, somehow on these journeys, I feel closer to her than if she were back home, darning stockings, or their mind perhaps on what their children would have for supper or something. Because now whenever I need help, I just all have to say, “Louise, you’re a little nearer the throne than I am. You know better what I need to say, and you just open up those windows and let the heaven flow in.” As a matter of fact, when my oldest daughter was told that she couldn’t have any babies, and my second daughter had already had two, and Helen May began to look around the orphan asylums to adopt one.

Marian said, “I know that Helen May could have a baby,” so we prayed about it. And presently we heard she was to have a baby, the first of July. And I said, “I can just see your mother up in heaven saying, ‘There’s a better assortment up here to select from than if those orphan asylums, and I’ll just pick one out personally and deliver it.’” Now the baby was due the first part of July, and my wife’s birthday was August 4th. July went by, no baby. August 4th arrived in a telegram. “Little Glenn just arrived.” I said, “I could just see Louise arranging that with the Lord, so she… we’d all know that she had something to do with it.” Two years later we heard she… Helen May used to have another baby, the last of August. But when August 4th came, another telegram. “Little Gordon just arrived.”

And I said, “Louise, you just did a wonderful job up there, and we want to thank you for it.” And when this book, Windows of Heaven, is to come out, this is the… Mr. Exman of Harper’s said the time we’d like to bring it up, it might be the 4th of August. Would that be the… all right for the official? I said, “That’ll be my wife’s 70th birthday.” And so that comes out. Another baby born, a little… in the form of a book. Well now, in other words, I don’t weep for folks if they’re in heaven. I mean, I weep for my sons or daughters if they’re living in hell here. I weep for myself when I find I’m out of tune and mad at everybody and full of fears and angers, and that isn’t heaven. That’s either purgatory or hell, and we all get a lot of hell right here. So I start the day that you don’t have to wait till you die, that you can start living in the kingdom right now, and then watch these things happen. And they began to happen. I found I was always with people I wanted to be with. And then I began to wonder, is it because I am… my own disposition has changed so that I’m…

I can see good in them? It is true that one of our women went home from the Camp Farthest Out. She said one day, “Whenever I get… go home from the Camp Farthest Out, I’m always so surprised at how my sister has improved.”

My three children taught me a great lesson in the first drama they ever put on. It was up in the attic of the grandfather’s barn, now turned into a garage. And my little four-year-old boy announced, “This play will be called The Wise Judge and the Two Stupids.” The gunny sack curtains parted, and behind the table sat my eight-year-old daughter with the grandfather’s spectacles on. Here sat my six-year-old daughter, and here my four-year-old son. The little daughter said, “Judge, this is my cookie.” And the little boy said, “Judge, that is my cookie.” And the wise judge said, “I’ll soon settle that. Now, Judge, he has the biggest half.” “Well, I’ll soon settle that. Now, Judge, she has the biggest half.” “I’ll soon settle that. Now, he has the biggest half.” Pretty soon there’s a wise judge and two stupids.

I used to think that love had to be measured out on a 50-50 basis. And if he slid down to 25 to 45 degrees, you should slide down to 35. Then he goes down to 25 and presently you have a bankrupt friendship. I have discovered it doesn’t matter where the love comes from, just so there’s enough love to fill the room. And so, the one reason why the camps are so effective is we have Marge get up here and swish around enough love. To fill the room and then we get up and just go sliding down the smooth slide of love into your hearts. Now you’ll be amazed how you can help to create heaven. Not only by your prayer in the morning, but by stepping out and seeing heaven and others.

However magic did seem to appear, I actually did meet everybody I wanted to meet. I went to Washington on the train and I said that Dr. Carrel has written a book. And he’s a great scientist. He’s received the Nobel Prize for medicine. And I’d like to meet him. And I had heard that it’s almost impossible to meet Dr. Alexis Carrel. And when I reached Washington, I got a telegram saying, “Alexis Carrel would like to meet you. Can you see him Friday afternoon when you’re in New York or Saturday morning?” I wired back, “I’ll see him Saturday morning.” Even his wife, who is head of a great hospital in New York, came down. She was eager to see me too. And we had a wonderful visit. And it had a lot of some really big implications. Because he wanted to meet men who could think in two lines. He said, “I hear you can think in two lines. You’ve coached athletes, taught literature and know about prayer.” I said, “Well, I’ll connect you first rate with Dr. Carver.” That friendship was wonderful. He said, “Now I’m retiring and I wondered if I’ve been thinking how I could reach the people. Could I write, start a column, daily column?” And I said, “That’d wear you out. I don’t know that you could write down to the people in the newspaper type.”

But you could reach just as many people, half the effort, or one tenth the effort. If you were to write for the Reader’s Digest, they reached 18 million people. He said, “I don’t know the editor.” I said, “I do, I’ll write a letter of introduction.” And then came those wonderful articles in the Reader’s Digest about the power of prayer. DeWitt Wallace wrote me later, thanking me very cordially for bringing him in contact. So you see, you put a little wish like that when you’re in the kingdom of heaven, to be with somebody and they want to be with you. That’s when it’s heaven. Oh, I could go up and knock on the door. Herbert Hoover, somebody said, “You want to meet Herbert Hoover.” I was, he’s in this hotel where you’re staying. So I phoned him. I phoned him and he was very busy, but, he, and so busy, he had time to answer. I could have crowded in there, bored him to death, worn him out. That isn’t heaven. I don’t go seeking people at all. Let the Lord arrange it. And so when Roger Babson, a man I admired very much, wrote me a letter that “I have read a couple of your books, young man, and I hope you’ll come. I’m eager to have you come and see me.”

“Can’t you see me this summer?” I wrote him that I was going east for the last of August and that I, like, everything was full as far as I knew, but I could, by getting back a little late, later than I wanted to get back, I could take a Saturday at the very end. And, when I reached Northern Vermont, Dr. Holt, a famous professor in the Chicago Theological Seminary, who was driving me, said, “I forgot to tell you that my wife has 40 relatives in Northern Vermont. And they always have a two-day reunion at this time. So you have two days to do anything you want to with.” Now he hadn’t told me that. I thought everything was taken. And I’m no good myself at just loafing around and looking at the flowers because I love human nature more than I love nature. I didn’t have any books. I didn’t have any plans to use that time. One reason I can accomplish so much, do three men’s work, as some say, is because I don’t have any waste motions. I enjoy everything I do and I go out speaking for three months and then when I’m just full of people, I go home and you say, “I want to rest.” No. I get thousands or scores of invitations to come out of my beautiful lake home and just rest a while.

“You should.” No. I go up to my office and throw myself into my writing. That’s complete change. And when I get tired writing, after about three weeks, then I get on an airplane and go out and get full of people again. Wonderful change. You don’t need any rest. Just change. So here I was with two days just to loaf. And a man, one of the in-laws came out, began to fix from breakfast, began to fix his car. Said, “I just got a wire. I’ve got to go back to Boston. Right away.” I said, “You go by Wellesley Hills?” “Wellesley Hills? I sure will.” “Well, you have a passenger.” I hopped right in. I didn’t bother to wire Roger Babson that I was coming Monday instead of Saturday. He might be the other end of the earth. But when you’re in the kingdom of heaven and the things all open up, you can just step right out and know the Lord is arranging it all along the line. And when I reached Babson Park, beautiful as Mount Vernon, I stood there on that great veranda and rang the bell. A Japanese servant came to the door. It was eight o’clock at night. I said, “Is Mr. Babson in?” He said, “Dinner. Don’t interrupt him now, but when he’s through, tell him that Glenn Clark is here.”

I sat in one of those great porch chairs looking at the hemlocks and the beautiful scene of this great park, all belonging to this millionaire. And presently a tall man with a little goatee was standing there as straight as a poker. “So this is Glenn Clark. I thought you were coming next Saturday, but what brought you here today?” I said, “The Lord did. I step in the kingdom of heaven every morning and He told me to come today.” “Well, He certainly must have told you because I just got back day before yesterday from a two weeks trip. And I’ve just got a telegram. I’ve got to leave on a day after tomorrow for another two weeks trip. And I wouldn’t have been here next Saturday. How did you say you start out your day?” I said, “In the kingdom of heaven.” He said, “You know, the last town I was in Canada was called Paradise.” He said, “Where are your things?” I said, “There, Wesley.” “And, oh,” he said, “I’ve got a suite of rooms here. Anytime you want to come.” He’s had me down to Winter Park. He’s had me clear out to St. Paul, to my home. And why is it he has such faith in me and in the Camps Farthest Out?

He says, “The Camps Farthest Out are the only thing that can save this world from war. All these millionaires and all these politicians aren’t able to do it.” And I was giving this talk one day and I told how I’d… And Roger Babson was sitting right over there. And I said, “Roger Babson said, ‘The last town I was in Canada before I returned was called Paradise.’” He turned to the lady beside him. He can whisper as loud as I can shout. And he whispered, “That was Paradise, Nova Scotia.” And so he verified it that he was in Paradise. I was in the Kingdom of Heaven and there you are. In Paradise and the Kingdom of Heaven meet. You got something. I went down to see Dr. Carver. He had been writing me for years to come down and see him and see his God’s little workshop where his miracles came. He said that… and I finally arrived Saturday noon. “Oh, my beloved friend,” he said, “you’ve come just the wrong day. All Saturday afternoon, all Sunday we have… My infantile paralysis victim has come to me. Excepting when it rains. Can’t you wait till Monday?” I said, “No, I’m to speak in Atlanta tomorrow. But I’ll go to lunch and I’ll come back and see how things are.”

And I went with perfect confidence. I said to my friend, Jim Hartwick, “I know it’s gonna rain.” He said, “It doesn’t look like it.” I said, “I know the Lord wouldn’t have arranged to have me come all this distance to a man who goes out every morning and talks with a dear Mr. Creator. And a man who steps in the Kingdom of Heaven every morning. When the Creator and Heaven meet, He’s gonna see that something happens. He wouldn’t have had me take this journey unless He was planning to have it rain.” And it was raining so hard we could hardly get out the car. None of his victims came. We had all afternoon to talk. I put it into a little book called The Man Who Talks with the Flowers. And it simply has gone into three… A third of a million copies have gone out. I get letters every week from people whose lives have been changed. In fact, one millionaire businessman in Philadelphia says, “I give that book, The Man Who Talks with the Flowers, to all my business associates, all these cynical men that don’t believe in prayer and religion, and they read it. Because,” he said, “they don’t know they’re reading religion until they’re halfway through, and then it’s too late to stop.”

And he’s very proud of his tricks, as he called it, of creeping up to them on their blind side. I’ve written a book now, The Voice by the Lake, that goes farther than The Man Who Talks with the Flowers. The Voice by the Lake. I have been giving that in talks at the other camps, and it just takes them by storm. But I give exactly what I have in that book. It’s a little 50 cent book in there, just off the press. I’d urge you all to take that home, and if you want to have a chance to give a speech, you just memorize the main points in it, and you’ll just hold any one spellbound pie. It tells the greatest thing, greatest expression of Jesus over in the world in Asia. An American boy went over there, and a young man, and he relinquished his love of architecture. Went over there, he thought he’d stay here and become a famous architect, and then he could support three missionaries. But finally he remembered that unless you relinquish your father and mother and your brothers and sisters, for the kingdom’s sake you’re not worthy of the king, so he relinquished it. And today he has 25 architects working under him, and he is… He has changed the whole area of Japan.

He is supporting 300 missionaries, and he’s a missionary himself. And to hear all that, you really, it’s worth reading. And I’m going to tell you this. He is accomplishing, The Voice by the Lake, Merrell Vories, accomplishing more than David Livingstone, Albert Schweitzer, Jane Addams, and George Mueller combined. All those famous workers for God, when you read that, you’ll see what… how a little mustard seed, as he called it, planted there, has spread, and Kagawa. Just before we arrived in Tokyo Rose, and he said… And he said… In the Christian communities, the crime rate is the lowest. Ever since Mr. Vories went up into the Omi Hachiman, there’s a million inhabitants, among those million… that there hasn’t been a single murderer in the 50 years that he’s been there. And he’s converting them into Christians, 20 a day, or 100 a day. And the best influences he has is pointing out a place where Jesus is expressed in life. And so, when I went to Japan, I wanted to be with Kagawa, and he was out traveling everywhere. And the very last morning, we just… He didn’t have anything to do that morning, but we were to leave right in the early afternoon. We phoned out. Kagawa had come back and was eager to see us.

We went out and had the whole morning with Kagawa. I’m flying Friday up to be with Kagawa at Kōmona, where he’s addressing the trainees next Saturday. I was very eager to meet the man that… the Captain Fuchida, who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor and has since become a Christian. And I didn’t even know where he lived, didn’t know where to find him, but sitting there in Osaka at a table with a prominent businessman that we were to address, a fine, handsome young man came and sat down, asked across the table from me, and Marsha whispered to me, “They say that’s Captain Fuchida.” And so we asked him to take a little of our time and tell us his experience, and he said, “I went down to… I asked the Japanese who had been prisoners in the Philippines, when they came back, how were they treated? And they said, ‘Wonderfully, but especially marvelously by a young woman who had helped us in such wonderful ways.’” Did I mention this the other day? Yeah. “And we asked her why she was so good to us. She said, ‘My parents were missionaries here, and they were captured by the Japanese and accused of being spies. Their remonstrances got nowhere, so they were condemned to be executed, and they asked for half an hour before they were to be beheaded to be alone with their Bibles.’”

“And I knew if they were alone with their Bibles, they were praying for their executioners.” And then these Japanese said, “Why, if anyone had executed our parents, that would be sufficient for us to have a blood curse, to have a hate against them for life. And you mean to love us? Why?” “Because of this little book, this New Testament. A man 2,000 years ago told us we should forgive our enemies.” Well, when Fuchida heard that, he said, “I want to get hold of that book.” And he didn’t know there was a God of love. He didn’t know there was a Savior like that. And he got so on fire, he has to be baptized. And now he’s going up and down Japan, the hero of Japan, winning them over to Christianity. And he sent that story of his life to me. I’m going to try to get it placed in some magazine. And I’ve been inviting him, either this winter or the next winter, to come over and go with me all over America. And his address will be, “No more Pearl Harbors.” My address will be, “No more wars.”

A world at peace through a world at prayer. Well, those things happen. You just, in your kingdom of heaven, you meet the people you want to be with. We didn’t miss a person, even Queen Wilhelmina. We had a morning with her. We didn’t even plan, and so on. And so, you live in the kingdom of heaven, there you are. And why mention all these things? Why? Because I look at you people. I want to be with you. I have to assume that you want to be with me. There’s a little assumption. And sometimes, when you learn how to… Maybe you learn how to walk, he falls on his nose. Walking is a falling process. You fall, and then you catch yourself. When you start living in the kingdom of heaven, you may also slip once in a while. And once in a while, I expect to be in the kingdom. And I find some people out there don’t want to be with me, but I want to be with them. So you do tend to your end of it, and pretty soon the Lord will tend to His, and wonderful things happen. In two of my books, I tell of a white-haired gentleman going through a train, and he stops and asks if he could sit beside me.

Then he tells me that… He told me that on every journey across the continent, the Lord tells him which person to tell his story to. Just one person. He told me his story about Heinz Weed. He told me that he had to change my life. He told me that he had to tell my story to one person, provided the Lord points him out, and almost regularly he does. I was on a boat going from Boston to Portland, Maine. I hadn’t told my story. I went down to the supper. Three men were at the table. The tables were for four. Two of them were perfectly silent, but the man opposite me was talking all the time. “Have you ever been on a Maine coast before?” “No.” “Don’t you think it’s beautiful?” “I sure do.” “Where are you going?” “I’m going to Monhegan Island.” “What are you going to do there?” “I’m going to be the guest of a writer.” “Did you ever write anything yourself?” “Yes.” “What did you write?” “The Soul’s Sincere Desire.” “You know what impressed me most in that book was the golf illustration.” And he warbled on and on. Told me more about the book than I knew myself. Later on, I was on the deck watching the sun go down and the stars come out.

And here’s the young man walk, pacing the deck, looking around and finally saw me. “Would you mind talking to me a while?” I said, “I’ll be glad to.” So we walked the deck together. “I am chaplain at Amherst. I have to address the boys once a week and I don’t know how to hold their attention. Can you help me?” I auto, I’ve coached athletes for 20 years. I suppose you think it’s your first duty is to make them good. “Why certainly, I’m a minister.” “That isn’t your first duty. Your first duty is to make yourself good.” “Oh yes, that’s right.” “And your second duty is to make them happy. But you can’t make them permanently happy until you’ve given them the basis of goodness that you have found.” “Go on,” he said. “This is exciting.” So I talked with him for an hour and then he stopped and took me by the lapel of the coat. And he looked me straight in the eyes. “Now I know why I’m on this boat. I went down to the North Station to buy a ticket on the train and an unseen hand seemed to push me right through the station down to the wharf. And I got a ticket on the boat. I’ve been wondering why I’m on the boat.”

“Now I know. If you’re ever near Amherst, I want you to speak to my boys.” I said, “What is your name?” He said, “I don’t have a card. It’s Arthur Kinsolving.” I said, “Oh, I won’t need a card. I can remember that.” He said, “Why?”

“Kinsolving?” “Well, I have my problems I have to solve are between kinsfolk.” So, two years went by. I was on the Maine coast again, this time on that trip with Dr. Holt. He had arranged with some other theological professors at Union Seminary to have me address 50 ministers who were summering out on the coast of Maine. Then we had a lunch together and then I addressed them in the afternoon. And out of that came the Camps Farthest Out in New England. One at Winnipesaukee, one at Star Island. We held them at exactly the same time, 400 and one, 200 and the other. They seemed to be so popular in New England. It all sprung from that little meeting. At supper time or the lunch time, opposite me sat a tall man who said, “I’m the chaplain at Dartmouth College.” “Oh,” I said, “then you must know a young Kinsolving, chaplain at Amherst.” “Yes,” he said, “but he’s not there anymore. He’s at Trinity Church, Boston.” An old lady said, “That was Phillips Brooks’ old church.” I said, “I consider Phillips Brooks the greatest minister that ever lived. And so he’s the assistant pastor in that great church.” “Oh, not assistant pastor, he’s the head pastor.” “What?” I said, “How that church must have degenerated. It has such a young man as that.”

“No, no,” the lady said, “it has grown since he’s gone there.” And then the chaplain said, “He’s especially developed a power of drawing young people. It’s become the byword of Boston, according to the editor of the Atlantic. The girls at Wellesley College call their car, the bus that takes them to church on Sunday, and they call it the Kinsolving Special. And the Harvard boys go there, and the young people go. It’s amazing.” And of course, that thrilled me, because that’s what I prayed with him and talked with him that night, was how to draw young people. “Yes,” said the old lady, “he even draws them from the Old South Church across the way.” And the chaplain said, “Don’t talk so loud. The pastor of the Old South Church is down at the next table.” And then she said, “Don’t I know it? He’s my son-in-law.”

But not only do the people, are you with the people you want to be with, but the ideas come to you in perfect sequence and order. How can I, who didn’t start writing books until I was over 40, how has I been able to write a book a year, turn out a book a year the last six years, and I intend to turn one out the next six years every year. And it takes a famous writer three years usually to write a book. I’m going to tell you the simple way I do it. I go to that Bible class every Sunday when I’m home. And they come from 40 different churches, and they don’t come for oratory. They come for manna, as they call it. They expect the Lord to talk through me, and so I’m amazed at what does come through me. And I say, “My, I didn’t know I could give as good a talk as that,” and make some notes on it after I give it. Then I come and… Then I come and give it to Camp Farthest Out many times until they get bored and I get bored, and then I put it into a book. And so there’s no effort. The ideas come in perfect sequence and order because that Bible class is trained to live in the kingdom of heaven.

Norman Renshaw, talking before folks that come here, finds his ideas just flowing out to the right sequence and order. Yesterday morning I came to give a talk I’d never given before, and I just wondered… I asked the counselor to pray, and I was amazed at the way the thoughts came out in perfect sequence and order. I want to say this. If you step in the kingdom of heaven, your ideas will come that way. And but… You’ll say, “Yes, you must have been a pretty good speaker first, folks.” I was famous as the poorest orator in the Northwest. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t an orator. I didn’t speak because I knew I couldn’t. But we belonged to a… I was teaching in a Presbyterian college. And whenever a Presbyterian minister in Minnesota got sick, they phoned in for a substitute. And after a while the president came and he said, “We don’t have enough substitutes, so you’ve got to write a sermon.” So I wrote a sermon laboriously filled with sawdust. I called it “A Cup of Cold Water.” It’s the driest sermon ever preached. No church ever asked me to come back and preach again, so I didn’t have to write another one. And after a while I found I didn’t even get a chance to speak that, because my wife would usually get sick about the time I was starting to…

Down to catch the train. So I had the doctor… and then I had to phone for another substitute. I asked the doctor to examine her to see if she really was, or was just playing possum to keep me from going away. And he looked her over carefully, and then he said, “Yes, she’s really sick. But if anyone ever heard you give that sermon, they’d know it would be enough to make anybody sick, just to think about it.”

Then I started living in the kingdom of heaven and put that aside. I was going to burn it up. I’m glad I didn’t. I’m going to embalm it. I’m going to put it in a museum someday, where people can see what not to do. And then I said, “Lord, You do the speaking through me.” And I was amazed that people could abide and listen. And then I sat down and spent 12 summers writing an article for the Atlantic Monthly. I sent it to them and they sent it back. And I sent it to Harper’s and it’s still back.

And then a boy asked me how I prayed. Now you folks have done some praying, but you don’t intend to write books about it. You’re a layman and I was a layman. I had written… I could write a book about coach athletes. I had written a textbook on the short story. But because he asked me, I went home into my home and I sat down and said, “Lord, now I’m going to step in the kingdom of heaven. There, the ideas come in perfect sequence. You just take this pen.” I was amazed at what came forth. And then I read it to a group and one of them said, “That’s too good just for us. Why don’t you send it to the Atlantic?” Well, I knew the Atlantic didn’t accept religious articles. So I tarried. Month after month. Month after month. Finally, I mailed it. And to my surprise, the letter came back from Ellery Sedgwick, the famous editor. He said, “If your article had come a month earlier, we wouldn’t have accepted it. If it had come a month later, they probably wouldn’t have accepted it.” You see, in heaven, you do things at the right time in the right way. And you don’t know why. I didn’t know why I tarried.

“We just received an article by Dr. Kirsopp Lake, the greatest theologian in Harvard Divinity School, on prayer, in which he says, prayer never accomplishes anything. It’s only grafters and crackpots that say that prayer can heal people. That prayer can help to raise this building funds and all that. Prayer is a lovely thing. It’s a matter of worship. But don’t pay attention to these crackpots.” Well, the editor said, “We wanted… He’s so famous, we wanted to put it in, but we wanted to get something to take the other side. We didn’t want to have asked… Well, it was 90 minutes to we dared ask because we knew they’d write a little perfunctory, firstly, secondly, thirdly, things they’d gathered from this source and that source. But when yours came, it came out of a vital experience. Not like flowers had been cut off, dead, going to wither away, but like wildflowers pulled up with the rich loam of the forest still clinging to them.” That is why the world, I’ll tell you folks, the world will listen to an authentic spiritual experience. Even the cynics will. So they put it in. And I asked how… I asked them… The bookseller, the newsstand man, when the Atlantic put on the stand. This was in 1924. It was to come out in August 1924.

It comes out the 27th of the preceding month. So on the 27th day of July, I went over and bought an Atlantic, took it home. My wife said, “Why don’t you get a couple of more so we can send to our mothers?” I said, “I’ll get them tomorrow.” I went over and they said, “They’re all gone.” I went to the next newsstand, they’re all gone. I went to the drugstore, they’re all gone. The man stopped me. He said, “We don’t understand this.” He said, “I’ve just been phoning around to get some… get one from some other stand. The Atlantic Monthly is a drug on the market. We have to usually send them back to the company. They’re good, true story magazines. The detective magazines, the moving picture magazines sell like hotcakes. But this issue was sold out immediately, the very first day.” The editor wrote that it was sold out immediately all over the United States. He said, “Your little article sold it out instantly.” And so later on when I wrote them another one, then they asked me to expand it into a book. And they gave me eight days. Take out Sunday and New Year’s, Christmas and New Year’s and the two Sundays. I had eight days. And it takes a writer a year at any rate to write a book.

I sat down and said, “Lord, You’ll have to work this typewriter for me.” And that Soul’s Sincere Desire just came out like that. I got a letter from the South Pole. From the second in command, Larry Gould, who accomplished more than all the rest of them put together, according to Admiral Byrd. Larry Gould said, “Twice the bird part of his life’s been saved because I have carried your book, Lash to my dog’s Ledge. And that enables me to get in tune with God. And one night I said to the men, ‘Get out of your sleeping bags and move a hundred yards over there on another ledge of ice.’ And how they did grumble. Well, the next morning there was a cavity, a chasm down at the center of the earth. Where you all would have been if it hadn’t been for that book. When I come back, I’m going to bring you this. Copy? I was writing care of the lighting monthly when I find where you live. And I’m going to give it to you with a stamp of little America upon it. But not until you’ve given me another one with a stamp of your autograph on it.” He came to my home. He just thrilled my children. He wrote the most moralist testimony on the, on the, that book.

We had him as a leader of the Camp Farthest Out. He just took them by storm. He came to me one day and said, “I’ve been offered the presidency of eight universities. I wish you’d pray that I select the right one.” He selected one. And then after he was inaugurated, the governor went down to help the inauguration. The next day he rode up, 40 miles up to St. Paul. Came into the prayer room and sat, knelt down and said, “I want you to put your blessing on me.” Larry Gould, he’s the greatest president, college president in America today. But there had been 60 folks in that third party never had to come back if I hadn’t let the Lord bring the kingdom of heaven through. So I’m a great believer in the ideas coming at the right time. And you can have a lot of good ideas, but to have them reach the Atlantic at the right time. To reach the right man at the right time. And by living on that and trusting in it, more and more you find that comes to pass. More and more you find that comes to pass.

And so when I get up to speak, I don’t pray that I’ll make a great oration. I pray that I’ll fill the cups and the needs of the folks before me. My mother used to take me to a dentist on Sundays. I mean on weekdays. And every filling he put in my teeth remain there to this day. He was a good dentist. He took me to hear a minister on Sunday who didn’t like boys. And his sermons came rattling out as fast as he put them in. The difference between those two men was the minister didn’t give a snap of his finger for the needs in my little boyish heart. But the dentist let the flow of his gold be governed by the cavities in my little boyish teeth. And so I find when you ask the Lord to do that way, wonderful things happen. But things don’t always just flow in just like that. I mean, don’t you fall and bump your nose sometimes? Well, when you start to… When you’re born, you have to learn how to walk. And when you’re reborn, you have to learn how to walk. Well, I was on the Hennepin streetcar line. I paid my fare and they gave me a transfer. And I got on the Selby Lake car and reached down my pocket and put in another fare and sat down.

And there was a transfer sticking up like a sore thumb. Now, why did I have to pay an extra fare to this rich railway company? City railway company? When they didn’t need it. And I was a college professor and I needed every nickel I had. Well, maybe it was to give my wife a chance to laugh at the absent-minded professor, but she had plenty of chances for that. But I said, “I’ll just have to let that go.” You make some slips. When you’re in the kingdom of heaven, you don’t make any slips. But the next day I was to give an address at Hamline University. There’s a young lady out here that’s attended Hamline University. And she found I lived in St. Paul. That’s our rival college. And they wanted me to come up and address the whole Hamline University. Professor Byer wanted me to come up and address them on how to put inspiration into writing. I finished my short story class, went out and got on the streetcar, reached in my pockets, found I looked down at my new suit I’d put on for the occasion. And I reached my pockets and found I hadn’t changed anything but the suit. And how could I ride on absolutely nothing? I stood on the back platform wondering.

The conductor came out and he collected the fare from all the other laboring men. And then he turned to me and he said, “I got your fare.” And he went in. I said to myself, “If I were George Washington, I should say, ‘I cannot tell a lie. You did not get my fare.’” And then I looked at his uniform, the same uniform the man had the day before. And then I thought how considerate it was of the street railway company to take my fare when I had it and not to embarrass me when I didn’t.

And so when my son went over there in the army in the Second World War in the center of China. And his sweetheart married another man. When he came back, he found that Agnes Sanford had helped Larry Gould, president of Carleton College. He had such faith in the CFOs that he went to see her to pray for some ailment he had. And she was so interested in him, she sent her beautiful daughter clear out to Carleton College. And there she happened to meet my son. And they happened to fall in love and they happened to get married. And I think it was a better match than the girl that he lost. And so when the door slams in your face, you can always see if there’s a door pointing to a better door on ahead when you’re in the kingdom of heaven. Abraham Lincoln lost the senatorship, but if he hadn’t lost the senatorship, he wouldn’t have been made president. I have found I’ve given up a number of things. Relinquished many things. But for everything, for the kingdom’s sake. Whenever I relinquish something bigger comes in, if it is for the kingdom.

Well, I must close. I won’t go into telling how the third element of the kingdom, that is, about the supply residing in the need. I told about how the gymnasium came to Macalester College. I told about how… I believe I told about how Macalester College, the poorest college in the world, the Presbyterian college in the world, has become now the richest. I tell you about that. But at any rate, it was when old Dr. Wallace died, stepped into heaven, his wishes were multiplied and power by infinity. Then his son DeWitt, that had never made a success, he had given him $500, thought it was the last money, hoped it was the last money you ever have to give him. DeWitt asked me to pray for his little magazine, 16,000 circulation. And we prayed through the old Father up in heaven, whose wishes were multiplied and power by infinity now. And that little magazine shot from 16,000 to 60,000 to 600,000 to 6 million to 18 million. And now, college endowments are hard picks. They’re struggling for their life. Endowments may come, investments may come and may go. But the Reader’s Digest goes on forever. And DeWitt Wallace doesn’t let his right hand know what his left hand doeth. But all I can say is, and he won’t let anyone know what he’s doing, so don’t please ever tell him this, that I’m telling on him.

But Macalester College is safer financially than any college in the world. I found that when you step in the kingdom of heaven, everything that I’ve touched, my old college Grinnell. I’m going back to my reunion. They may ask me to give an address or something. Everything I touched seemed to, even the, I’m sorry, the stout, seems to succeed financially. Now that we’ve got the kingdom of heaven spirit, harmony, and the koinonia, I feel it’ll come there. They piled up a debt of $30,000. When they made me president, I said, “All right, now we’re going to have harmony for the first time.” We put it all in the hands of the Lord. “Don’t any of you even ask for money? We can ask people in the camps to pray, but we’re going to let the Lord then do it.” Why, in two months’ time, half of that debt’s been paid off. Before the summer’s over, and before Christmas, the rest of it will be paid off, I know. I’m such a believer, if you can get a spirit group of folks to get in the kingdom of heaven, these other things will be added. And what are those things? You’ll be with the person you want to be with, when you want to be with them.

Come to Camps Farthest Out and see if that isn’t so. That ideas will come in perfect sequence and order to bring blessings to others. See if that isn’t so. If they have a real need, and they’ll give it utterly to the Lord, you’ll find the supply of a role to meet that need. I’ll close with this, which illustrates it. I was…

Every morning… One year I wanted to write some more. After I wrote The Soul’s Sincere Desire, I was so anxious to write, that I found it so hard to find time or to write. And on Thursdays, I didn’t have any classes until noon, until 11 o’clock. So if I stayed away from chapel, the 10 o’clock chapel that morning, I would have that time. But one morning I woke up, stepped into the kingdom, and every bone in my body said, “Go to chapel.” Every nerve said, “Don’t sit down at that typewriter, you can’t stand it.” I didn’t know whether I was running away from my work or not, but I felt God was telling me. I walked into the chapel, in time to hear the dean announcing that a car with four of our students in it had gone over a cliff the night before. It had turned turtle four times, and little Margaret would not live through the day. As I walked out, I asked the professor if that was a little freshman girl that I knew, and he said yes. That year the students had asked if they could come down to my house once a week and let me talk to them on the kingdom of heaven. I said if you’ll come down a quarter after two, Tuesday night, and leave promptly a quarter of…

A quarter after seven, Tuesday night, and leave promptly a quarter of eight, so it won’t interfere with my activities or studies nor yours, it’ll be all right. They came, a dozen or so at first, and finally grew until I was sixty or seventy. Filling the floor, festooning the window seat on the stairways, and I’d talk as I’m talking here this morning, and then I’d end with a prayer, and they’d walk in silence back to their dormitories. The football team came, a very mediocre team they claimed, but it was the first year they ever won this championship. They said they were always in the right place to receive forward passes. They made the right decisions, everything worked just in the right way. It was almost like magic. And the athletics of Macalester have been on a spiritual level ever since. My wife said, “There’s a little freshman girl named Margaret that has a wistful look. I wish you’d talk to her.” One day I went into a classroom of a Professor Ward to talk with him, and the students were gathering, and he wasn’t there. Margaret was standing by his desk waiting for him, and I went up and talked with her and found she was the only daughter of a widowed mother. I said, “I’d like to have a talk with you.”

And she said, “Oh, I want to. I’m coming soon.” And now she wasn’t coming. I saw a boy hurrying to catch the streetcar, and I said, “George, are you going down to the hospital?” He said, “Yes.” “Is it on the main streetcar line?” “Oh, no,” he said, “it’s a long walk after you get down there.” I said, “Wait a minute. I have a little touring car that I have the battery put in storage for the winter. I just had it put back yesterday. You wait, and I’ll drive down.” When we reached the hospital, we found eight members of the faculty and the president and his wife standing in the hall waiting for the girl to die. George took me to the room, took me in, where the prostrate, unconscious little figure was lying. He introduced me to the mother who’d come down during the night, put his arm around her and took her out and shut the door, and they left me alone. The door opened. Two physicians came in. They closed the door. They began to examine her hands and her feet, irritating the palms and the soles of the feet. I said, “Do you think she’ll live?” “No.” And she was picked up. She had no blood pressure, no breathing, no heartbeat. “We want to see if she’ll be paralyzed for life if she does live.”

They paid no attention to me. Beside that bed was a table with a vase of flowers upon it. And I thought to myself, if that vase should go crashing to the floor, it would break into a thousand fragments. And if they took a moving picture of that and then turned it just the opposite direction, you’d see the fragments drawn up into a hole. Isn’t that what Jesus came to do? I came to make men whole. And I got a great revelation right there. That God has arranged this world, one world. And He has meant for it to be filled with peace and love. And if we let Him turn the moving picture, it would be. But when Stalin says, “I’ll turn it,” what does he do? He turns it just backward. Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt. I have to admit, everyone’s turning it backwards. I asked Roosevelt to appoint a spiritual trust when he appointed a brain trust. He refused. His wife wrote me a nice letter. I think she might have done it. If he’d had a spiritual trust in 1933, if Stanley Jones and Rufus Jones and Dr. Carver and a few men like that, when they came to crises, they’d have prayed about it. And I want to say this, I can guarantee we could have prevented the Second World War.

I know he could. But we want to… everyone says, “I can do it, Mr. Eagle. I can do it. I can do it.” What is just the reverse of love? Why, it’s hate. What’s just the reverse of peace? Why, it’s war. If all of us would just drop our hands on all the leaders and say, “Let the Lord do it,” we could abolish all armaments and all those things, we’d be in a utopia tomorrow. Why can’t we? Because we don’t have the intelligence of monkeys. You go to a monkey island and as long as there’s one coconut left, no monkey will starve. You go out to a lion country and you don’t find the lions kill each other. They just kill their meat. It isn’t the brute in man that leads to war. It’s the devil in man. Why, animals don’t kill each other, they just kill their meat. We have Brocuddy and Swift company do that for us. And so if we could just let the Lord turn the moving pictures, you’ll find always you step into heaven. And I said, “Now I’m going to see the Lord turning that moving picture. I’m going to put my faith in Jesus and life and not in gravity and death.” I had stayed there longer than I thought.

Went out, George had gone. I got in my car, reached my office, threw my hat down, hurried down to my classroom. It was the last class of the year. I especially wanted to meet with them that day. And I saw by the clock I was 15 minutes late. And no class had ever been known to wait after the first 10 minutes at Macalester College. My heart sank, but I had some books in there I had to get, so I walked into the room. It wasn’t until I was in the very center of that room that I discovered that every boy and every girl was in his place. The silence was not a silence of emptiness, but a silence of prayer. One of the boys softly closed the door and one of the girls whispered, “They told us where you went.” I went up behind my desk and I said, “I’m not in the mood to talk about the little secondary laws of grammar and rhetoric today. I want to tell you folks, I think that little girl is going to be with us next year. Unless, if you want to become a writer, you must depend upon the great primary laws. Open one ear to the voice of God and put your other ear down to the heartbeats of humanity.”

Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have come to Macalester College because he didn’t go through an accredited high school. He never even went through a first grade. And yet, when he went, he wrote that Gettysburg Address better than anything that you’ve ever done in these classes. And when he went to Gettysburg, jotting down these notes, he said, “I can’t hallow, I can’t dedicate this ground. The boys who fought and some of them died here.” And their parents coming in the buckboards and wagons to hear him give the address. He put his ear down to their heartbeats and he let them pull that out of him. He listened to the voice of God and let God speak it through him. I said, “If any of you could write anything as good as that, I’d give you credit for the whole year’s work.” They told me, some of them, that they learned more in that half hour than they had in half a year. A year went by and a little girl in a white dress came into my office and I said, “What brought you here?” She said, “Today is the anniversary of the day they thought I was dead. I came to thank you.” I said, “Don’t thank me.” Down on the corner of 7th and Wabasha, and the late afternoon, the heavy traffic hour, there stands a policeman.

He stops the traffic east and west. He lets the traffic north and south go through. Then he stops the other traffic and lets this through in perfect sequence and order. Well, that man hasn’t had a sixth grade education. Supposing I push him aside and say, “Let me show you how a man with a college degree can handle this.” Well, I’d have no power. They’d just laugh at me or they’d run me in. What does that man have that I don’t have? Simply this. He wears over his heart an insignia that shows that he’s an instrument of a government greater than himself. And if you and I can go back from this camp, back to our homes and our work, carrying deep in our heart an insignia that shows that we’re just an instrument of a government greater than ourselves, the time will come when we can stop the wrong ideas and our friends, alcoholism, stop it. Let freedom and release come through. Stop illness here and let health come through. Or if there’s enough of us, we can… If you have faith enough, we can stop war. We can make a new world.

And now I hear the Gabriel sounding his trumpet. And to proclaim that we can do that. So let us pray. Our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for this wonderful Lord’s Prayer. We are asking that You may let Thy kingdom come and Thy will be done in our lives on this earth, here and in our homes as it is in heaven. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.