The Hate That Bumps Your Nose

The Hate That Bumps Your Nose

by Glenn Clark

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I’ve been suggesting I start the thing going, but under one condition. And I think that is that you’re going to hear other speakers tomorrow. But that isn’t the place to start. That isn’t where Jesus began. He didn’t gather all the who’s who and all the millionaires together.

If you’re a millionaire and you’d rob somebody, you might get in. Because He just wanted somebody who had committed a sin or revealed a weakness. Therefore, at the beginning, how many of you have some weaknesses? Put your hands up. All those that you think have some weaknesses. Now, any of you that didn’t put your hands up don’t have on a wedding garment and should get up and go out. But how many of you have been sick sometime in your life? That isn’t the only thing. You could qualify without that. But how many of you have been sick sometime in your life? All right. How many of you have been very sick sometime in your life? That’s less. How many of you are sick now? Put up your hands. That won’t be so many. Just a few. Now, that’s a wonderful place to start. Because God reaches in at our weakest point. The only handle that God can really take hold of with power is at the point of your weakness. “My strength shall be made perfect in your weakness.”

It furnishes a handle. One of our Macalester graduates became famous. An outskirts of Chicago. And he built his church up. Increased its membership faster than anyone in the United States. I asked him his method. He didn’t go out and do any proselyting from other churches. He just kept track of… He had a few pointers. A few people would supply information. Anyone who was a family that had some serious illness that didn’t belong to the churches, he’d go and call on them. And after a few calls, he’d say, “If you get well, I’d love to have you come to my church. And we’ll try to keep you well.” If there was folks who didn’t belong to any particular church, lost a loved one, he would seek them out. And go in and pray with them.

Just by reaching out to their weaknesses, he pulled them all in to God. Never was this nation in such a shaky state of weakness. We thought we were the… We thought we had the… old lion by the tail. We thought we had the world in our lap. We commenced to realize that there are some other folks around the world that are pressing pretty hard in on us. And we’re commencing to shake a little like the European nations who used to shake all the time. Never knew when they were going to be invaded. Well, in other words, the United States is just ready for the Lord to reach right in to the White House or somewhere else and take this whole nation into captivity to Him. Now is the time. And so when I say you’re a wonderful group of folks, regular champions, giants of the Spirit, it’s because at some point every one of you must have some weakness or you wouldn’t have been here. Well, and so how many of you here have lost some loved one that you dearly loved? Let’s see the hands who know really what bereavement is. There is a marvelous place where God reaches in. I don’t know of anything, at any point where God can reach so deeply and so completely.

After my 30 years at Macalester, I want to say that all those years I was preaching this sort of thing, but for 20 years I was. And in that 20 years, there’s a wonderful group of students. I get word from them. They’re missionaries here and there, and some of them were touched by me and some were touched by others. But of those who really grasp this, it went out all this way, and I think we all have to admit honestly, without any false modesty, that we do stand for this farthest out. It goes a little bit farther than a good many groups, good many theological seminaries, good many churches. Without any criticism of them, many of them are going just as far farther than we are. But we do go farthest out, we know how. And out of those students, most of them graduating with a good ethical viewpoint and all, but there’s a sifted group, about 300 in the course of the two 20 years. 300 that we might say would go all the way, that were just contagious. Wherever they went, they just spread the contagion. And I sat down one day to see what it was that was characteristic of them all. If there was a common denominator, and I found there was.

I’ll be frank, it startled me. I don’t think it’s the only requirement, but it certainly was there. Every one of them had an empty chair in their home. I don’t mean a grandmother or grandfather gone. I mean a brother gone, or a sister gone, or a father gone, or a mother gone.

Actually, it came that close. There’s one exception. I even mention his name sometimes. His name is Jim Pinney. He went, in some ways, farthest of all in some ways. His folks were all living, but they all had many troubles and burdens. But I’ll never forget when he was a senior, how his father called me up and said, “Jim is in the hospital, and the doctor says there’s no hope for him. And so we’re turning to prayer.” And so I will say this. If any of you were on the verge of going across and were prayed back, that may do it. But I found a little touch of heaven. I won’t care how it can be analyzed. All I know is my experience, and it’s been a very profound experience because I’ve been walking in very, very deep waters with folks that have been very in deep waters. And I have found that has been one of the… has been the clearest, most wonderful thing of all. It even began when my own brother died when I was 14. He is 12. And peace came to me after a year of great sadness and loneliness. When I resolved definitely, I was going to do the work of two men and I turned to the Bible. And for three…

For months, I just lived in the kingdom. I fell out like a boy of 15 will. And it wasn’t until I… years later that I really set out definitely to find that path again. And this time, I decided I would… having found my way through that thicket, that jungle, I would blaze the trail. I would mark the path, which I did in the writing of The Soul’s Sincere Desire and The Fishers of Men. And when I’d finish a path, I’d sit down and put it into a book so I myself and others could find the way. I didn’t have the power to write or to think or to chart the way when I was 15, so I slid out of it. But I knew the path was there from the moment that my… after the shock of my brother’s death, turned me with a calm and a peace toward the center of all life, the heaven. And then, as I have repeated, because many of you are all American team, have been around and had some of my coaching before, when the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, the brilliant seller, Ellery Sedgwick, who built The Atlantic up as no one ever had, put on the jacket of the book, The Soul’s Sincere Desire, “This man finds prayer as natural as breathing, and all his prayers are answered.”

And I said to my wife, “I’m going to write to the editor of all things. He doesn’t believe in these things himself hardly. Why does he go to Ballyhoo?” And I know that my wife needed anything like overpraise. And to my amazement, my very modest wife said, “I wouldn’t bother, Glenn. I’ve noticed that ever since your mother died three years ago, all your prayers have been answered.” And then, Starr Daily never could quite understand what it was that brought that sudden shock of change to him, almost like the change that happened to Saul of Tarsus. His father, who had spent fortunes on him, hiring the best lawyers and everything else, and begging and persuading, and finally found that he was still pronounced incorrigible by all the judges and the psychiatrists, the father laid down and died, starved as in the penitentiary for the last time, perhaps for the rest of his life. And after the father, who had been sending out love on this horizontal level, like the rest of us do, that love, you say, is a wonderful thing, but it isn’t that redemptive love. The moment he stepped into heaven, what happened when my mother stepped into heaven? All her wishes for me when she was on this earth were limited, with their little inhibitions of mind and tensions of body, but the moment she stepped into heaven, all her wishes became multiplied and powered by infinity.

And power came into all that she had dreamed of for me. And when Starr Daily’s father stepped into heaven, his wishes became multiplied and powered by infinity, the heavens opened and Jesus came right down there just exactly as Jesus came down to Saul of Tarsus after Stephen stepped into heaven and let his wishes be multiplied and powered by infinity. And so, those of you who have had these losses, now simply turn to heaven and say, “Let your powers be multiplied and powered by infinity,” and you know what I want you to join me in prayer up there for, and you’ll begin to find renewed power and renewed strength from the very sources that brought you sorrow and sadness and weakness before.

Well, we don’t want to go off and join the soldiers in Korea and say, “Let’s put us in the front ranks so we can be mowed down.” I wish that we middle-aged folks that brought this war on could. And let’s save those fine young boys. I just wish that I and the scores of others I know of that would be willing to do it could just march over there and save a lot of boys I know that had their lives before them. But what good is it going to be to lay down your life? I think Saul of Tarsus, and he became Paul, he didn’t die to reach folks. Stephen died to reach him, for he learned another secret, a very subtle and wonderful secret. He said, “I am dead. I’m crucified in Christ. I live, but not I, but Christ in me.” You know, you’ll find the power in folks here. You’ll find a number of them here who are so selfless that the power comes through just as powerful as if they were dead. The highest compliment you can give a friend and say, “You know, you’re just as powerful as if you were dead.” Be quite a shock.

But, didn’t Jesus say, he that would lose his life shall find it, and he that would find his life shall lose it? Well, so this is a funny kind of inventory to take the start out and see how many of you have good big muscles. How many of you have good big muscles? How many of you could make my football team? Put your hands up. Some of you men. I bet a lot of you could. But I’ll tell you, the new folks that can’t make the team don’t have any muscles. Maybe there’s another place where God will reach through. The best football coaches aren’t those who are the best players. They were the ones who yearned to be great players, like Zuppke and Warner. I could go down the line. All the greatest ones, practically. And they took it out in developing the men. The fine young singers, the artists. There’s a wonderful singer we had up here who sang wonderful solos up at Tennessee.

And she had a mother who was a wonderful singer, and could have been a great artist in singing. I believe her name is… I believe her last name is Parkhurst. But she married a minister and just had to be minister’s wife. But her yearning, Kay took effect in the daughter, don’t you see? My mother wanted to be a writer. Or I had some gifts in writing, but she had six children. And she invested her time in her children, and I’m doing her work. So, by losing your life, you create life. Well, what are some of the other things we could do? Oh, yes. Mustn’t forget that. How many of you are sinners? Put your hands up. And any… No, I mean, Republicans.

I might ask the Republicans to put up your hands. And the Democrats. Then you could look at each other and say, “Yes, there’s a sinner.” My son-in-law, Norman Elliott, was telling a story of an army marching up to Korea during the first advance. And they ran across two prostrate figures. One of them was found as dead. He was a Korean. The other was a Marine. And he came to. He was all right. They asked him what happened. He said, “Well, I was coming along and I saw that Korean. I didn’t know whether he was a northern or southern. So I jumped behind this hedge and he jumped behind that hedge. And I stuck out my fist and I said, ‘To hell with Stalin.’ And he stuck out his fist and said, ‘To hell with Truman.’ And we were shaking hands in the middle of the road and a jeep ran over us.” Now, you Republicans can laugh, but we Democrats feel sorry. But at any rate, those are the kind of stories being thrown out now. And they’re going to be, I mean, they’re all going to be either not only in fun, they’re all going to be fighting each other for an election. Well, what about that? Well, that’s all seething around outside. We are here.

And I’m going to tell you why God can reach through your errors and your sins and your mistakes. I can almost say that the most powerful spiritual men I found are men who have committed some error, like Starr Daily. St. Francis was a wastrel, a young blood. And perhaps the worst of them all was, not the worst of them all, but Augustine, St. Augustine. I think St. Paul himself was the worst. He was the murderer. He brought hundreds of Christians to death. And because the rebound that and the terrific repentance, a God of grace could reach through and take him and he really knew what Jesus’ forgiving love was, just as Starr Daily does and some others of you know. And therefore, the Alcoholics Anonymous has been almost a feeding ground for the spiritual forces to be released. And so, beginning then with any weaknesses we may have, let’s begin. I did hear a minister once give a sermon in which he prided himself that he had never committed a sin. As a boy, he had never crawled under a fence in an apple orchard and grabbed any apple that wasn’t his. He had never attended a movie or smoked a drink, never had read a detective story, never read a novel, never danced.

And he gave such an anemic sermon that when it was through, I said, “If I’ve got to hear him next Sunday, I hope he goes out and robs a bank and repents of it and really has God come down to this redeeming power and turn some power loose.” Now, I don’t think you’ve got to go out and commit any crime to get power. Just look back over your past, every one of you, and you’ll find plenty of little mistakes that you can just shovel them out like coal, put them down in the furnace in repentance and you can warm your whole house or run the whole machinery where the mistakes you’ve made in the past you won’t need to start any new ones. Well, now we’re all ready to go ahead. I talked about the way the candidates now are commencing to roll up their sleeves and go at it.

8,000 years ago they wouldn’t do it that way. When a primitive man got… was filled with anger, he took a war club and went out and attacked his adversary. When he found he was attacked by the dinosaur or cave bear or saber-toothed tiger, the adrenaline would be poured into his system through the various glands. Adrenaline glands would get active and that would just put new fire and power into every muscle and every nerve. He would take the… he would use all that in running so fast that these animals couldn’t catch him. But when he would lose his temper, even more adrenaline would come in nerving him with more power and he’d go in and kill his adversary. And he’d work it all off into men just exertion and struggle and running and fighting. Today we don’t see a cave bear coming, but we see a bank failure looming up. Our business getting ready to fail, and we’re filled with the same adrenaline pours in, and poison, and we don’t go out and run it off. And it just rests in us. Falls into little pockets, and there it is. Now, you take eggs and fish, we have a wonderful new what we call a refrigerator system. And we can preserve them now for weeks.

You can eat a turkey a year after it’s been killed. But back in those days a year after that turkey had been killed it wouldn’t be very palatable. In just about three months those fish, those eggs wouldn’t be very palatable. And suppose they put them in the cave and leave them there awhile, and there they are filled with the rotten fish and rotten eggs. That’s exactly what we’re doing with our bodies today. We don’t have an adequate refrigerator system. We’ve developed everything mechanically so much faster than we have our spiritual, our psychological, and all these other systems, we’re just commencing to discover the great lag.

And so you can just see, you’ll just see the Democratic leaders, the Republican leaders, commencing to be sick after a while if they begin to get mad enough, because, well, I guess if they go around, make speeches, and wave their arms enough, Billy Sunday never… he can survive. But there’s the trouble. We’ve got these. We get the same thing. That’s exactly what’s the trouble with us today, and we’re coming out here to study how to drain off those things. There are two ways, just two sure ways. It’s a terrible alternative. On a human level we’re all going to be sick, and we’re just as normally and naturally sick. It’s a wonder we aren’t a whole lot sicker than we are. There are two ways we can jump. There’s two fences we can jump over. One is to jump over into the caveman days and just go around to the club and fight everybody under the sun that we get mad at, or if you get scared, just run it off. And the other is to jump this fence and get over there where the angels are, so above anger and fear, just so completely above it that we can forgive our enemies instantly, and if there’s anything to be afraid of, we’ll say, “What’s to be afraid of? I’m going to lose my life for God’s sake, for the sake of the Lord’s work.” If we can just step over there, we’re safe, or over here we’re safe. But on this middle ground, for the rank and file, march. Not the high road and not the low road, but that middle road. There we march. And there we march as just a great army of invalids, mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Well, we take medicine. That’s alright. And we have the dentist cut off some of these pockets of poison. That’s alright. But if we go right on, pouring that adrenaline of fear or resentment or hate in there, we’ll pretty soon have another pocket. The same old thing. And so, we’re discovering all those limitations. We’re coming here to learn how to help others. I believe this first group, for the next three days, we’re going to study how to make other folks well. Or how to guide them and direct them. And I find it’s a good thing. Football’s a good thing for the boys that play it.

They work off the adrenaline. They can get mad. They can get worried. But they can go out and work it off. It’s those that sit in the grandstand that suffer the headaches. And the coach sitting there. The coach’s job is the hardest job in the world, physically, healthy men. And you find more breakdowns among coaches than anywhere else. They all get arthritis. Or anemia. Pernicious anemia, usually. Or high blood pressure. Now, to sit there and just have to take the disappointments of this defeat. And get mad at the way they’ve been the unfair decision here. Just to sit there and go through it. Because for many years, I’ve been a coach. And I’d say football coaching especially, with all the alumni leaping on you.

And… just… go down the line. And say, “I want to get a job out in the fresh air. So I’ve quit being an accountant. I’m going to go out and be a football coach.” Well, pretty soon you’ll be in the hospital. Say, “I better go back to accounting. It’s much healthier. The air is better in here.” Well, now that’s just throwing things open. But how do we go at it?

And… someone has said, “Anger is the punishment you inflict upon yourself because of the wrongdoing of another.” The anger… And if you ever get angry, I know I have a few times in my life, especially years ago. And I found at first I’d get angry at the person for the thing he did. But presently I was feeling so miserable that I was angry at him for making me angry. And if I just get over being angry, three-fourths of my cause of anger would vanish away.

I had a wonderful brother-in-law, sweetest soul in America. Most Christ-like man I think ever knew. And he was so devoted to his company, he thought I was a little radical to say that the profit system, the only trouble about it is, there’s… It’s a little too cold-blooded. They’re all as spiritual as you are and as I’m trying to be in my business. Why, there wouldn’t be no communists. Well, he was practically lifted up to be practically consulted by the two heads, the brothers, in charge of it, who owned an immense business, doing millions and hundreds of millions of dollars. And the war came, he… they couldn’t get certain materials, but he being the head chemist there, he brought in an invention, an idea worked out, that saved the company $600,000 a year. And then the two old men died and the son took charge, the son that had worked in his department, he’d helped to train. Presently, the son said, after a year, he said, “I’m going to weed out the older men, so we won’t need you anymore.” “Well, I’d like to stay a couple of years more, I’m working out an invention, I think we’ll help the company.” “Well, we can do without you.” And so they gave him a pension of $50 a month.

Well… So he retired, well, he still somewhat in his prime, and he died of cancer. Sweetest soul in all the world. So I asked my sister, were they fair to him and that company? I’m afraid to say no. The young man who succeeded his father wasn’t. And I said, can you tell me the details? He said, well, after a couple of years, the way the company began to go down, this untrained help just began to go down and down. So he sent a letter saying, we’ve been losing money last year, so we’ll have to cease giving you the gratuity. The gratuity. A man who had saved them $600,000 a year really might have been president of the company even.

Well, and he said, and as my sister said, he said to me, “Don’t tell anyone about it. We’ll just try to forgive him.” Now, I tell you, the folks who swear them, just swear it out, they don’t die of cancer, they die of apoplexy. But the sweetest souls that can seal it. He couldn’t help but feel hurt. He couldn’t help but feel the great injustice of it. It just ate a little bit there in Red Lintel. And all of his four grandparents lived up in the 90s. He was a year younger than my sister. We all thought he’d outlive her probably by 40 years. I’m just telling you a situation, and yet people will say, if you would have cancer, that’s a sign that you must have had some resentments, and therefore you’re not such a most spiritual person. You’ll find the sweetest persons in the world are the ones that get cancer. They conceal it. They keep it in. But they have had some very often very, very good reasons for righteous indignation. If he could have only told it to me, I think we would have prayed about it, and we’d have said, I’d have just, well, been better to have gone and just up and talked with a man.

When I heard it, I want to say, I almost got… I just heard the details, I almost got cancer in the spur of the moment. I’d like to have just sat down and written to this young man, the president of that company, “You murdered my brother-in-law.” And he did.

But murders are going on all around us. However, my brother-in-law was open to it because he was sensitive and so easily hurt after all those years of sacrifice. To make yourself almost with the height of a rhinoceros against feeling any hurt, any fear at all, you’d be safe.

And those are the situations which you will have to deal when you go out and want to pray for folks. And when you begin to probe into their past, and a person’s dying, and you don’t say, “Now, oh, I see. Now that’s what’s causing your death because you couldn’t forgive that person.” Don’t do that. That’s a terrible thing, have a person dying, be thinking that he killed himself. I wouldn’t want to talk to my brother-in-law that, at that stage, when he was in the last stage, it’s about that. But I would like to… there’s this kind of a prayer, power. There’s a… let God’s love come down to you and send that love out to the person that hurt you, or that angered you, or that is unjust to you. Now there’s a certain amount of justice in this world that we’ve got to consider. We’re human. It’s better for your own child to be punished when he has committed a sin, than to let him go on and be coddled in it. And you might say your enemies are better to be punished a little bit. So it’s alright to ask God to take care of them. So I’m going to tell you a little technique here, because I understand that’s what you’re here for.

If anybody sends out wishes of hate toward you, and just wishes you’d go out and fall down, bump your nose, if you are over here with the saints, and have nothing but no fear and no hate in your heart at all, that can reach you at all. But if you know that he’s doing that, and if you’re afraid of him, or if you send hate toward him, which you usually do, that hate that you build out forms a perfect bridge to meet his hate. So his wish comes trotting along over his bridge and says, “Aha, I won’t need to build the rest of it. It’s already built for me.” And it comes down and you walk out and fall down and bump your nose. Now I want to say frankly, in the years I’ve been exploring and experimenting, I’ve actually seen that happen. I have fallen down and bumped my nose and broke my glasses, and found there’s somebody that I knew was against me, was wishing that sort of thing. And I’ve also made this discovery. That if you ask God’s love to come flowing down, and without any fear or hate at all, you just say, “God, You send Your love and mine too, out to meet that person.” Instead of a bridge, it goes out as a wall.

What happens? You’re perfectly safe then, and what’s more, if you’re mad or angry with him, thinking you ought to be treated justly, and somebody ought to punish him, the Lord will then take charge. “Vengeance is mine, I will recompense, saith the Lord,” provided you keep your hands off. If you put your hands on, and He’ll say, “Oh, I see, you’re doing a pretty good job. I’ll leave. I can tend to some other folks. I won’t need to bother about you.” But if He sees that you’re completely taking your hands off, and you’re sent out of all of love toward that one, not to hurt him, not to bring about what is going to come about, which is this, his hate thought and his wish will boomerang, bounce against that. It won’t hit, won’t boomerang the very first time. It won’t hit him the first time. But if he keeps it up about the sixth or seventh time, it boomerangs back and he goes out, falls down, bumps his nose, exactly what he wants to happen to you will happen to him so perfectly that it’s almost, it isn’t funny. You feel sorry for him. And you see that God is taking charge. Now you see that’s kind of a mean thing then to love your enemy.

I do want to say this. When Jesus ended that first chapter in the Sermon on the Mount, and He said, “Do good to those who despitefully use you. Love those who persecute you. Forgive those who despise you and say scandalous things of you.” Why, sissy, isn’t that effeminate? That’s what these Nietzsche and those blonde beasts of the German philosophers cried out. It’s the most powerful force in all the world. You see it in the histories. Gandhi that sent out nothing but love, liberated themselves without fighting firing a gun. We are sending out our guns to Korea and we’re not getting anywhere. If all the nations of all those churches in America should join in that great war of amazing kindness of Frank Laubach, or if we just ask God’s love and our love to just go out toward the Chinese and the Russians, and they’d continue to plop evil things against us, everyone would think it would boomerang back on them. The big miracle wouldn’t be the boomeranging back and what would happen to them and the liberation from us. The miracle, the impossible miracle, the miracle that was beyond what we can even imagine could have come. The big miracle would be to get all the folks in all the churches of America to send love toward our enemies, to really take Jesus to His word.

There’s where the miracle comes in. But beginning with yourself individually, trying it out if you can do it, or your family send out love to someone that’s trying to hurt you, then what happens? The other group are changed. They feel that love and they’re changed and melted and become your friends. And if they don’t, they get bumped and bumped. Well, here was that wall of love that Stephen sent out to St. Paul. Or rather that wicked murderer Saul of Tarsus. He said, “Lord, don’t hold this against them.” He sent out a wall of love that continued out there ever after and grew in power when he released it by infinity in heaven. And it just sent Saul of Tarsus smash-bang down on the ground, bumped his nose.

During the Second World War, we went out and get… Third front, we call it, and we went to the Church of American Athens to send love toward Hitler. And all his grand things began to bounce against him. We weren’t the only ones. There’s thousands of folks everywhere doing it. But in his case, he didn’t get changed. He was smashed and remains smashed. And so if they’re redeemable, that redeems them. And if they’re fiends incarnate, that’s more powerful than all the guns in all the world is that love. The point is this. If you can get the folks who think they’ve got to hate and hold this righteous indignation and are causing their poison and their ailments and their sicknesses, if you could persuade them that they aren’t giving up. They said, “How can I stop from hating this situation? How can I stop from hating that person?” Well, you’ll turn him over to God for just three months. And all the punishment you think he should deserve, if he really deserves it, he probably will get or he’ll become your best friend.

Another thing Jesus said was that if you lust in your heart, you’re just as bad as if you commit a crime of folly. If you have anger in your heart, you’re just as bad by implications as if you murdered a man. Now there is a strange thing and people didn’t believe that. They don’t believe it to this day. I say we’re just seeing murders going on all around us.

I was saying that if you love, if you hate, if you have a brother and you love him and he marries a… or your son and you love him and he marries a girl and you hate her, and you hate her to the point of where you really wish that she were dead and your son was liberated and come back to your smother love some more, you don’t hit the girl. That hate doesn’t… that murder thought doesn’t hit the girl because she isn’t so close to you, but the son who’s between you is the one that will be struck down. You’re really committing a danger and you’re participating in a… the danger of committing a murder. I was saying this at Star Island and one of the greatest… well, dynamic leaders in the Presbyterian Church, a wonderful woman, seemed to be pouting all day and I said, “I guess I hurt her feelings. She’s a… probably she doesn’t think I’m Orthodox or something.” Very high up in the… in the Presbyterian Church. In the evening she came and told me what her gloom was. She said, “I’m thankful what you’re told this morning. I… you’ve saved a life. My three sisters… three of us sisters, and we had one brother. He was the youngest. Any girl that fell in love with… with him, we just… we were so jealous of him that we just hated her.

“We finally married a very fine girl. She’s two years older than he was. They had two children. When he’s 28 years of age, he just suddenly died. The doctor really couldn’t diagnose what it was. Now this… the children have grown, and the son is now engaged. And… we are just as jealous of him as we were the father. He’s our pet. And we’re sending hate toward that girl. I’m gonna write my sisters at once.”

Well… my Bible class in Minneapolis. Two lovely women. One of them, I thought they were just… One was having a very hard time with her husband. He even… she had me even talk and… talk with him. And he said, “My love is dead.” He said, “Sometimes I just hate her. I just wish she were dead. I just… I’ll just have to… The only way for us is to get a divorce.” The other was a couple that were known as the most perfect couple. They always were together. They never had a quarrel. He always did whatever she wanted. And then… She came and told me that… that he wanted a divorce.

And he finally arranged… He’d gone out of the state. He wouldn’t even come back to the state to see me. But he’d pay my expenses down to Wisconsin to talk with him. He said, “I won’t get near my wife.” I said, “I thought you were just perfectly in love.” Well, he said, “We’d go out riding. And my… I’d get out with my daughters. And we’d go up and… pick flowers. And we hadn’t been picking very long. She didn’t care to pick flowers. She’d bring in a honk. We’d come back. She didn’t care for the flowers. She didn’t care for this. But I always did everything she wanted. But there were always the things… And now I’m just so sick and tired of doing… I just… I can’t even abide her.” And so, well, there they were.

One of their daughters… They both had three daughters… Was in an automobile with four girls. And they had an accident. Not one of the girls was hurt. But their daughter was killed. The other was the only child in an automobile. It was an accident. None of them was hurt. But that child was killed instantly.

One day my wife and I were having a rather vigorous argument. We really were getting a little bit warm about it. It was warmer than we ever had gotten before. It seemed to me… I could hear my eight-year-old boy sliding around on the roof. I always hated to have him on that roof. Fixing his aerials. My wife was braver than I was. She said I never had a brother. And I never had any boys in that family. So I decided if I had a boy, I was gonna let him be a boy. So I’m not gonna be… But this time she said, “Oh, Glenn, call Miles down until we finish this argument.” I went out and said, “Miles, you come down, won’t you?” And… I said, “Come down.” I didn’t say, “Won’t you?” He said, “Why?” I said, “You come on right down here, right away.” I went in and we talked fast, finished our argument. Kissed and everything was happy and… Uncle Dory and then my boy came down the stairs. Said, “What did you want?” And I said, “Well, you can go back now, fix your aerials.” “Well, what was the big idea anyway?”

I have written a book. Or rather, I mean edited a book. The best thing I ever turned out is so… Footsteps… Let’s see. It’s a story of my… It’s the journal of my wife. Stepping heavenward. It begins with an accident. And when I got home, I said to my wife, how… She was in bed, the others had been taken to hospital. “How did it happen that you had an automobile accident coming home from your prayer group?” Well, she said, “Miss so-and-so and Mrs. so-and-so on the front seat. One of them was a fundamentalist, one was a modernist, and they were just debating the place where they were just about ready to pull hair. When the auto just… When we were struck by an auto, and it went over and over and over, and those two were almost killed.” One arm was almost cut off, and the other was… Neck was broken. She’s an old lady. Then, and she’s still an old lady, but she wears a brace in the neck to this day. Well, all I’m saying is, this seems to be putting everything on the externals. But it’s putting it where they belong and where Jesus put it. The healing begins inside. So some of our talks may be along the line of how to get back and get completely in tune on the beam.

Seek first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. Well, let’s ascend on a happy note. We begin to say, yes, I believe I’ve committed a lot of little sins. I don’t know how many people I’ve killed, haven’t gone into war, carried a gun. But every one of us said Burbank, the time’s coming when everyone who casts out hate thoughts and jealous thoughts are going to be considered evil, bad citizens.

Doing a disservice to the world just as much as folks who put poison into wells. And that’s why after every war come these great pestilences. And we think we can cure them with medicine and we can’t. Sweep things under the rug, the dust will come out another time, in another way. The only way is to sweep it out in the garden of God. After the First World War there came this terrific attack of flu, which killed twice as many people as were killed in the battle of the First World War. Ten million over against twenty million. After this war, now we’re safe. We’ve got the flu cornered. Well, it comes bursting out in polio.

And so when one of my sons-in-law got a tremendous worry, began to feel a great, almost a breakdown. He came up from his Dayton home and my sister and my daughter were there with the two little boys. And they took him off to get a rest and all. But the whole thing was staying at the home, my home, while my sister, under sister’s daughter’s home, who was away on these journeys with Norman and their little children. And I got along to the telephone just a couple of weeks ago. “Our two little boys had the polio.”

Well, she’d waited a long time for those little boys. Now, and… but the guard was down. They were in danger because they’re filled with tension, filled with worry, filled with concerns. And it… the air is just filled with hate thoughts after a war. Fear thoughts. Just re… the whole world is filled with it. And it’s just gonna hit here and there. And I want to go back just for a moment about this matter of our loved ones in heaven. It now lightens things up a little bit. My oldest daughter wrote that the doctor said she and Kermit couldn’t have any children. And they were looking around in the orphan asylums to find… to adopt one. Marian said, “I know she could have a baby.” And I said, “Let’s pray about it.” And presently, we heard she was going to have. And I said, “I can just see your mother up in heaven saying, ‘There’s a better assortment up here to select from than those orphan asylums. And I’ll just pick one out myself and send it down.’” It was due the first of July, but then… Louise’s birthday wasn’t until the fourth of August. And all of July went by, no baby. Finally, the middle of the fourth of August came and a telegram came.

“Little Clint just arrived.” I said, “I can see Louise just arranging with the Lord to let us all know that she had something to do with it.” Two years went by and word came she used to have another baby. The last of August. But again, when August 4th came, little garden just arrived. And I said, “Louise, you’re doing a wonderful job.” And now here they were struck down with polio. Well, we were to a healing place like this. We sent up a prayer. And they came back all right in just a few days almost. Now, I believe we can just… How many of you folks have folks somewhere you want to have prayed for? We are. I believe if we just get up enough power here, not only we can pray with power for ourselves, but for others. But you can know that I’m not… We’re not any of us free from these dangers and our loved ones and everyone else. And there we are. But God is good. And even when He takes our loved ones in heaven, He can just release power through them. Well, now, we’re going to… It’s not quite nine, and you’ve had many long journeys. We’re going to wake up for a long, fresh march. Day to day, Maureen, you’re going to get acquainted with a number of folks of wonderful, had wonderful healing experiences.

You know, I want to be kind of… we want to pray about this. You don’t get dizzy from so many points of view, but there’ll be a unity. We’re going to try to hold a unity through it. And it all goes back to just one thing. The negatives, we’re going to pray out by letting God come in and take hold of us. Right at our very weak points.

So, because… Let me tell you very frankly, it’s good news. My son-in-law, Norman Elliott, stuttered so terribly that he couldn’t really answer the phone. It was his great affliction, humiliation. I have a Bible class. When I’d be away, they’d ask for Norman to come over. And he kept refusing. Then after a while, he said they worked a dirty trick on him. They began to pray for him. And then he had to go. And he threw himself completely on the Holy Spirit, knowing he was weak. And the Holy Spirit spoke through him, and he’s in demand at eight camps this year. And the wonderful things that have done have happened because of a great limitation. A man came to me, a Jew, who had been in the underworld. He belongs… he’s a gangster, been in the penitentiary. One of the New England, New York gangsters. Been saved from penitentiary several times by a lawyer, a CFO lawyer. And the lawyer said, “Go to a camp for the stout.” Well, he went. And Norman was there. And then he came to the Star Island. He said, “I came over here just to meet the uncle, the grandfather-in-law of Norman. I came down there. My father was a Jewish rabbi. But I had disgraced the family, and I was a lost sheep.

“And I knew none of you folks could help me or save me. But that Norman talked down on my ground. And he said to me, ‘Let’s take a walk, the three of us.’ And I looked around, he said, and I couldn’t see anybody. But Norman, I said, that I guess he must be a little haywire like the rest of them. And he said, ‘Where’s the third one?’ And Norman said, ‘You’re not ashamed to walk with Jesus, are you?’ And so he said, Norman and Jesus. And I walked around that lake. And when I got back, I said, ‘If a man is willing to die for me, to save me from my sins, I want to be a Christian. Well, can you find somebody that can baptize me tomorrow?’” And he, because he wanted to go all the whole hog, I guess you call it. They had to find a Baptist minister. And a baptistry. And in fact, he lifted the whole camp up. And then he came clear over there just to tell me he’s going to devote all his life now to that Jesus. But here is a man, a son-in-law of mine that I might have been ashamed of. But I never was. He just threw himself at his greatest weakness. And now here’s Kermit Olsen.

He says, “You know, I can’t get this mystic sense that you folks have.” He’s 38. Between the age of 38 and 42 that most of the great souls or prophets get their mission. And he’s felt inadequate. And now his children are sick and recovered. And now he’s going down into the depths, a little like I did when I used to have palpitation. And I began to see God reaching through at his weakness. And I’m not a bit of moaning the fact that he’s had this condition. And so as I look around and my children, one of the hardest things a parent has to learn is to give them the privilege of learning by their own mistakes. And out of their own weaknesses, God turned thorns to roses.

Now, we have power here. God’s going to reach right in from all these angles. And let’s have a prayer. Heavenly Father, we know that the greatest limitation brings the greatest power. That when Michelangelo found no marble was left but an old crag in peace, and that was all he could work on that winter, by studying his very limitations, he had to make an unusual figure, the boy David, which now is the greatest statue in the greatest art gallery in the greatest art city in the world. Yes, Father, here You’ve given us a kind of a stupid chunk of material, mentally and physically. Help us to just see what our limitations are and where our powers are. And in our greatest weakness, let You come in, Father. We’re going to ask You to come right in and out of our weakness turn into power. Out of that serious illness of Agnes Sanford. Out of being marked for death of Ruth Robison. Given up by the doctors with her cancer. Louise Eggleston, not expected to live. Why, it looks almost as though most of the folks who have gifts in healing have been those who have been weakest themselves at some time or other. So, Father, just reach through our mental, physical, or spiritual weakness, and You just pour in Your power, that we’ll just feel Your Holy Spirit just filling this place out of our very humilities.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are they that mourn. Blessed are the meek. Yes, Father, You began, Jesus began His great Sermon on the Mount by listing the points by which God could reach His folks. Father, take the threads of our lives, the tangled threads, and just turn the entanglement into a marvelous harmonizing. And take the threads of our lives and weave them into the tapestry of Thine eternal purposes. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.