The Ninety Days That Never Ran Out

The Ninety Days That Never Ran Out

by Starr Daily

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Heavenly Father, I feel a little wistful tonight as this camp comes to a close. I recall how eager You made me when I came into this camp. And now You are filling me with reluctance as it draws to a close.

Father, I may never see these friends again. There is a great love for them. And always before I was able to say so long on leaving here, and I can say that now, even though it may be goodbye, with the hope of meeting again in a better world.

So be with us all tonight, helping us to love one another and prefer one another as never before. And whatever anxieties and troubles and heartaches and cares and worries and disappointments and difficulties there may be in each life, we would ask that a capacity might be arranged in that life to receive a baptism in Thy love so that all these things may be dissolved. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. I want to talk about Jesus tonight.

Make Him central in our lives, and even believe on His name. He is wonderful. One evening, one afternoon rather, on the first day of March it was, 1930, I was sitting in the convalescent room of a prison hospital where I worked.

And there was a brilliant man who was an atheist. He had two college degrees, or university degrees, and three degrees, or three-time loser in prison. He knew the Bible from cover to cover. And he had used what he knew about the Bible to steal the faith away from especially young, impressionable convicts who were in there for the first time.

And he had the ability to do it. And he would promise them all sorts of things if they would just conform to the usual penitentiary philosophy. And that meant, of course, that when they went out, they’d be back. He was preparing them for returning back to prison. So he came over knowing that I was to leave the next day, and he wanted to fix me up so I’d come back. And he gave me the works, and I loved every minute of it. But I didn’t think that it was a waste of time and lost motion, for he gave me the most logical and reasonable reasons to prove to me there that afternoon that I couldn’t possibly make good enough.

First place, he said, you don’t know how to work, you don’t have any job, you don’t have any trade, you don’t have any profession. You haven’t earned a hundred honest dollars in your whole life. And all you have to recommend you to the society you’re going out in is a long, black, bleak, and dreary criminal record.

And he said, if you go and apply somewhere for a job, they will place an application blank in front of you. And you will read down it, and you will come to a place, “Have you ever been convicted of a criminal offense in your life?”

And if you’re a Christian, you will say, “Yes, many times.” But if you’re not quite a Christian, then you’ll be a liar. And you know the Bible says that liars cannot enter into the kingdom of God. So you will not get the job.

You will have on a burlap suit, prison-made. Everything you’ll have on will be prison-made. And you will go out with a ten-dollar bill in your pocket. And that will be donated to you by the state. And it will soon be gone.

And when you’re hungry enough, you will not beg. Because you have never been gifted in that area of your life. And it would hurt your pride to beg for food, or clothing. Oh, he was a very wise man. He had all the wisdom of the world. But I realized that to be carnally-minded was death. And I felt sorry for it. For he was carnally-minded and had all the cunning and cleverness of Satan. And yet I loved him. And would have given anything to have won him to Christ.

I would have been willing to give up my connection and my identification with the Lord, if by so doing I could win him over. But he talked on. And he tried his level best. And finally he said, “When these prison clothes you’ve got on are gone, and you’ve walked the streets and you’ve tried to be honest, John, you’ve gone to one place after another looking for work. At every place you’ve been rejected. Then,” he said, “you will go back to the underworld. And then you will soon be back here, or somewhere else.” So he gave me 90 days to be on the outside. Of course that’s been a long 90. And I told him that I wasn’t looking for a job. I told him that I wasn’t trying to be religious.

That I wasn’t looking for a church. I told him that I wasn’t looking for anything on the outside that belonged to society. I didn’t know anything about it. And therefore I wasn’t looking for it.

Well, how are you going to get along if you don’t get a job? You’ve got to eat. I know I’ve got to eat. But I know where there is bread. And despair. There’s only one thing I have to do. And that’s the simplest thing in all the world.

Is to let my eye be single. And then my whole body will be full of guidance and light. I know where I am going and why I am going. I said I’ve got it all planned out ahead of time.

I know exactly what I want and why I want it. I’ve got faith enough to receive it. And so I had it all down on paper. I put a lot of things down on that piece of paper. And then I examined it and rehearsed it and screened some of them out. And put new ones in.

And then I worked with that paper, that list, prayerfully, for quite a long while, until finally I had the list that I wanted. And of course all the things on that list, from the standpoint of the carnal mind, were utterly and forever impossible.

When I had had my encounter with Jesus in that solitary cell, I knew that He could take care of me. And that I wouldn’t have to make any particular self effort on my part. That I could be like the flowers of the field.

That’s so not. And neither do they spin. That I could take no anxious thought as to what I was going to wear, what I was going to eat. And I would take no anxious thought as to what I was going to say.

I was not far enough removed from Him then to have lost my primitive faith. That didn’t begin to weaken until later. But right at that time I believed everything that He said. And I believed every promise that He made.

And so I had no fear or anxiety. And this man said, but there’s a great depression outside. Millions and millions of people, he said, are out of work. And you don’t know how to work. How do you expect to go out and compete in that labor market with all these people who are qualified and skilled and trained and adequate and every kind of position?

And I told him that he was off the wrong, on the wrong track again. That I wasn’t going out to compete with anybody in the labor market. I only had a one track mind. And I was going to stay on that track if I could.

Well, he didn’t like that. He thought maybe that I could do it. And I believe if he had lingered around a little longer, he might have been persuaded to my point of view. But he felt he was losing and so he got up and left.

How can you argue against a man like that? He doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t need anything to his day from the carnal world. I put down on that list that Tony here is a lawyer. And I even put that down on the list. I wanted to be a lawyer and be a public defender, especially for young people who were landed in jail and didn’t have any money to buy a lawyer. And a lawyer would be supplied for them by the state.

And he would get up and persuade them to plead guilty in the way they’d go. Well, I wanted to defend them. I wanted to learn how to be a lawyer and defend them. I put it down on the list and erased it later.

And after I’d had this encounter with Jesus, I wanted to be His witness. And I’m glad Tony now is both a lawyer and a witness. For God prefers, I think, a witness, doesn’t He, Tony, to a lawyer. But what could I witness with? I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have a dozen brain cells working.

And that old life-termer that I’ve written about told me how I could do it. He inspired the list, in fact. He said, you want a witness, do you? I said, yes. Well, then you just commit yourself to that dream. And you’ll be able to witness.

But I don’t believe I would have been able to witness if I hadn’t have gone through a process of testing in the prison. I don’t believe I could have witnessed until I came to the place where I loved every man in that penitentiary, including every officer, the warden, and everybody else.

And the last man and the hardest man in there I had to love was the night guard in the cell house. He used to come down the gallery and stop and talk to my cell mate and ignore me.

And I couldn’t love him. And he was the last one that I was able to conquer through love. Love conquers everything. There isn’t anything it can’t overcome. If you just get enough love, you can overcome everything that happens to you. And you can say, you can actually say, all things work together for good in my life because I love the Lord.

And you can actually say the next thing to happen to me is the best thing and it doesn’t make any difference what it is. Nothing can be wounded in you but your ego. Your soul cannot be wounded, cannot be hurt.

But by the stripes laid upon your ego, you’re saved. You’re healed. By these stripes you’re healed. And so I had the blessed privilege, apparently, of meriting great persecution. And that was universal in the prison. All the friends that I had, and I had a lot of them there, were against me as soon as I had had my encounter with a higher dimension of conduct and behavior. And it’s awfully hard to be persecuted, even on the outside. It’s hard to be rejected. I’ve known lots of people, even out here in the outer world, who are rejected.

Many of them are timid people. Rather lonely. And very shy. Many of them have a very deep-seated sense of inferiority. And they don’t understand this. They don’t realize that it’s very close to humility. And it is very, very close to repentance.

And so they feel rejected. Sometimes they feel rejected right in their own home. Sometimes they feel rejected right in their neighborhood. Or maybe they go to church and no one says anything. And they come out and they shake hands with the pastor. And they can’t say anything. Neither can he.

And so they move around in the world in this great sense of loneliness. And they suffer from one of the hardest things that we have to suffer. And that is the desire to be needed. And I go into these homes for elderly people and see them in there, seldom ever getting a visit from their children.

Their children have grown up and they’ve married and they have their own children. And they are not able to keep going to see them. And so they are in there very, very lonely. They feel rejected. And it’s a wonderful thing to have a ministry to shut-in people.

I like to tell them that they have more power than anyone in the outside world. They have time to study, to meditate, and to pray. And they have time to gather together two or three mutuals in the place and have a prayer group.

And pray for their dear ones and for the world. Lord, Lord. Well, I was lonely there. I was rejected. If I walked up there would be a little knot of old friends, three or four of them talking. And I would walk up and get rather close to them and they would clam up.

And I’d just have to walk by until they got back into conversation. And there was physical danger. One of my best bosom friends in there resented me and hated me so much because of this encounter that he struck me in the head in the mess hall one day with a lead pipe and almost cracked my skull.

Another time he tried to stab me in line and I managed to duck and I got it in the leg. I didn’t carry the scar yet. And I had the great good privilege and great good favor of finally leading him to Christ as he was dying in the hospital.

Hard thing to be rejected. And this man told me all about the things that were against me. He told me that I’d been living as in an incubator, everything had been supplied. He told me that I did not have, while I was in prison, one single obligation in all the world.

The state had paid for everything. I had no insurance to worry about. No income to worry about. I had no contributions to make to worthy causes like we’ll make here tomorrow. And we didn’t have any of that. Everything was supplied. So I was just like a prenatal baby. Never been born yet. And he brought all that up. Then I lacked moral courage. I was going to, wanted to witness, and yet I had no moral courage.

And there are many people in Christendom, in the churches, who have a witness. But unfortunately they lack the moral courage to give that witness. And it’s not easy to give it. Not easy to give it to just an individual person.

For you have a kind of a feeling it will be rejected too. And you have a sort of a hunch that you will give offense. And then in turn you will be offended. And so it’s very subtle. And yet how are you going to witness unless you have the moral courage to do it? And to know that there is a power that will give you strength. And that will supply sufficient grace for you to witness.

Before anybody, regardless of who they are, at the bottom of human need, at the top of human privilege, no matter how educated they are or anything else, or how great they are in the world and politics, you can get a power to witness before everybody.

But the first thing you have to do is to start doing it. You can’t get the power until you start. But I didn’t have that moral courage. But I put it down there. I want that on the list and I put it on the top.

For I had to have that. If I were going out, I told you last night or sometime about a terrible ordeal I had trying to give my first talk in Los Angeles to a group of people in society. I don’t mean the 400 type of society. But society in general, the world. And I failed in the moral courage. But this woman, and they just kept at me until I got it.

Pulled the chair out from under me. Made me take my hands out of my pockets. Told me to get away from the piano. And she embarrassed me. And finally, the big embarrassment, she said she got mad. And she says, “Get out there and pitch.”

And I did. After a fashion. But it’s hard. Very hard. But if you will start by and by, you’ll get the power to overcome this. And you’ll do it. Now lots of people think that the big thing in morality is all kinds of little old sins you commit of commission and omission. That isn’t the big thing. The big thing in the moral realm of your personality and character is moral courage. If you’ve got a witness and you lack the moral courage to give the witness, that witness will be taken away from you. And you will live on the witness that you had 40 years ago maybe. You try to live on it though it’s long since vanished.

There are people in our churches. One dear lady in Houston told me that she had been in the same church for 35 years.

And said in the beginning of her Christian life she had a tremendous conversion experience. And she had a great witness. But she lacked the moral courage to give her witness. And so she’d come and sit in the same pew, Sunday after Sunday. And never go out or, even in church, get up and give her witness to the circle or anybody.

And so she said she lost it. And she said she was dry. She said that her prayers wouldn’t go to the top of her head. And she said she felt all the time when she was praying like it was meaningless. And even hypocritical.

And she said when they’d sing the hymns she’d just choke up on those great sacred hymns. She’d just dry inside. And she said the scriptures had no life in them like they’d had when she was converted, and after she was converted.

And I said I’m going to be speaking in an Episcopal church. She was a Methodist. And there’s going to be a big crowd there tomorrow night. And I want you to come along with me. And I want you to give your witness that happened way back there, 35 years ago.

I don’t know how many years she lived emotionally between that time and the next day when we started. But I thought she was pretty limp, and much, very much like a rag, when we got out there. And I introduced her to the audience. And I said this lady has a wonderful witness. And she’s just eager to give it to you.

And we went up, and I saw that she was a little limp. And I took hold of her arm. And you know she opened her mouth and started giving that witness. And as she opened her mouth the power came. And time collapsed. God collapses time.

In my case He collapsed the time from where I was then back to where I was at four years of age. At four years of age Jesus was as meaningful to me and as real to me as the people in my home.

I not only, He was not only real to me, I had playmates who were angels when I was four years old. I’d go out, I didn’t need company, I’d go out in the yard and play with angels. Wonderful little sprites. And Jesus was real. And in my experience He collapsed that time and took me right back to the place where I got off the track, and He started me over again.

And I think that’s exactly what He did with this lady. He took all those years that she hadn’t witnessed and just telescoped it right back to the point where she knelt at the altar and was converted, and gave her a fresh, new exploration and articulation of that wonderful witness. And it was wonderful. I didn’t have any brains, so I put down, I want to write, of all things. I put that down on there. I didn’t know anything, and still don’t. I did take a writing course. After I took it I couldn’t sell anything.

I’d been selling before. I apologize to my New York publisher about the mystery of punctuation marks. Glenn Clark was a professor of literature, creative writing, and grammar, and rhetoric, and those things. He said on a platform that he had never in all his life made but one mistake in grammar. And he said, “No sooner than I done it, I seen it.”

Well, that gave me courage. But I wanted to write because I wanted to witness. If you know what you want and know why you want it, you can have it through faith. Well, I have written quite a lot.

And somehow or other, the publishers, when I get down to the business of writing, I write 500 words a day while the editors wait. That’s not much, is it? That’s only two typewritten pages. But when you write two typewritten pages a day, it soon piles up into a book.

That doesn’t exhaust you. But those two typewritten pages mount up to about 20 pages by the time you get it revised. You see, your vision will not go into a book. And if it did go into a book, no one would read it. Publishers are in the business to make money.

And if you have a high lofty vision, you can’t put that down. Because people are picture minded. Ninety-five percent of all articulate people are picture minded. They can’t read in abstractions and nebulous visions. And so you have to tell it in parables.

And that’s the way they want it. And so I was told, and actually taught, by publishers. Tell me how to do it. And help me to do it. Send the manuscripts in there, and then they’d just go over them with a fine tooth comb and spend hours on end laboring over these poorly written manuscripts. And send me back long detailed ways of how they wanted it. And finally it would get published. And it looked like I had done it. Margaret wanted me to speak on a book tonight. But this being the last night, I don’t think I’ll give a book review.

She wanted me to speak on good news. I will review it briefly and simply say that good news is better than good advice. And that book, good news, is full of good news. And there’s some advice. But the good news is better than the advice. I put down on there, I wanted to speak, give my witness vocally also, as well as in the written word.

And that has come about through the years. And I put down on there, I want to get into the United States prison system. I want to work in prisons. I want the prison doors to open in as well as out.

And I don’t know, I think I’ve been in most of them. And wherever I’ve been in them, I’ve been invited by the chaplain. And this has been supported by the warden. And I find that wherever this has happened, my books have been put in those prisons. And I go in there and I have a nucleus out there in that congregation who’ve read these books. And I’m in rapport with them. And if I can get in rapport with even one person in a congregation of a thousand people, that’s all I need. Just talk to all. So that has been brought about. And I had never earned any honest money or living. And all these years I’ve been able to do that. Through my writings mostly.

And I didn’t have any health. All my vital organs were broken down with disease and bad whiskey and bad living. And the prison chaplain prayed for me and set in motion the healing virtues that brought about the healing there.

And all my life I’d been anti-social. I couldn’t spill across any borders except those underworld borders. I couldn’t love anybody. And I couldn’t fraternize with anybody except people in the underworld. Anti-social. I have overcome that. I don’t have any trouble now with people.

I get a little afraid of them sometimes until it gets started. It’s been a comedy of errors. And it’s been a strange sort of an existence. I don’t even understand it myself. But how was it done? I didn’t try. I just was centered in Jesus. I believed in His promises.

And I didn’t have a sense enough then not to believe in them. I hadn’t studied yet. I hadn’t been to a seminary. I hadn’t had my faith analyzed away. So I was just, I was really a spring chicken. I just believed. If He said it, that was so. I believed it. And that’s all there was to it. And I wanted a little romance in my life. In fact, the old liaper told me, you’ve got to have it. You’re only a half a creature till you have some romance. Get a wife. She’ll either make a philosopher out of you or a saint.

Well, I lived all my life in a womanless world. And I knew nothing of their refinement. I knew nothing of those marvelous instincts that they have, such as mother instincts. I knew nothing of the delicacy of their intuitive natures. All of that was completely foreign to me. I knew absolutely nothing about their keen and very subtle psychology.

I didn’t know that they’d make you wait. So I put that down on the list. Wonderful thing. I saw a couple in Indiana. They were in the Indiana camp. They were up around 80. And they had been married for 60 years.

And it was so delightful to see him. He was so polite in helping her. Wherever he’d take her arm, she grew up a step. And so genteel and polite and loving in the dining room. And get her chair out. And they looked alike.

Henry Drummond says that if you live with your wife a long time that way, and you go through all of the ups and downs of married life, maybe you lay some of your children away, maybe you suffer want and privation and even penury, and you weather all these storms together, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, and you never think about getting a divorce.

You never think about going back to mama or separating. But you go through the whole thing. All the suffering, sickness, and everything else. Side by side. And Henry Drummond says it is like two gases. Put gas in a receptacle, and put that receptacle in another receptacle of gas. And an osmosis will try to take place there. And the gases in this one receptacle will try to get into that other receptacle. And he said souls are exactly like that in the marriage state, where the marriage has been consummated in heaven. And that no man has been able to put us under. There. He says these souls go together. Mergence and osmosis. And they even get to thinking alike. And they finally get to looking alike. And that’s the way these elderly people were. It was just a delightful thing to see them. And I love to see old elderly people that way. Still together. Still loving. And still going. Thinking right the same thoughts. Feeling the same feelings. And then one passes on and the other soon follows. It’s a wonderful thing. Very, very wonderful.

Well, I didn’t know I was old until about a few years ago. I hadn’t given any thoughts.

And I was driving out from California to Iowa camp. And from Iowa to Nebraska camp. And from Nebraska to Wisconsin camp. And from Wisconsin to Boston, to be with Margie and Tony Brayton. And I stopped up somewhere on the New York freeway, or expressway, or whatever they call it, to get some gas. We’re usually reminded by others that we’re old before we know it.

And at this gas station, he noticed my California license. And he said, “Pop, did you drive all the way out here by yourself?” Then I knew I’d gone out of the 60’s. No one believes you’re old as long as you’re in the 60’s.

About three score and ten, they notice it. And I got another reminder on that same trip. It was on the Massachusetts highway. Went in a restaurant, one of those that you go off to the side, gas and food.

And there was a young fellow there sitting beside me at the counter. And we got to talking. And he got up to leave and he said, “Now, dad, take it easy.” So I knew I was making the grade.

I was talking with another man about Florida. He was a senior, and I guess I was too. He asked about if I had any hobbies, and I told him no. And he said, “Where do you think you’ll retire?” And he suggested Florida. I said, I don’t know about Florida. I’m from California.

Well, he said, lots of senior citizens retire in California, in Florida. And I said, well, I wouldn’t know what to do down there. What do they do? Oh, he said, they do everything. Do everything down there. He said, what would you want to do if you go to Florida? Well, I said, I could spend the rest of my life playing shuffleboard.

Or playing checkers or something like that. Is it warm down there? Oh yes. And you could sit out in the park and play checkers and shuffleboard. Yes, you can go swimming or anything. And I said, I don’t know why, I don’t know whether I’d like that or not. I don’t believe I’ll go to Florida.

So it is that life rolls on like the river. And we gain all sorts of values as we grow older. We can love more. And we can love in such a way that we won’t likely be misunderstood. We can actually embrace a lady, and people won’t think anything about it if you’re senile.

Now I want to make an announcement and close. Sister Ruth and I were coming in, having conversational prayer. And out of that prayer came a great decision. That I would speak tonight and that she would speak tomorrow night. And she wondered about it. And so you’re going to have a wonderful time tomorrow night. When Ruth gives us her parting message from Winni CFO. And gives us inspiration to go back home and to keep centered in Jesus who overcomes the world. And everything in it. And…

Oh, it’s been wonderful, Father. Such great waves of love. Such great waves of spontaneity have swept over this camp for the last four days. Vast faith has been quickened in the folks here. Everyone has been prepared to go back home.

And to do those great things that St. Paul suggested. Command. Whatsoever things are true. Whatsoever things are honest. Whatsoever things are pure. Whatsoever things are just. Whatsoever things are lovely. If there be any virtue. If there be any praise. Think on these things. And so we have the great joy and privilege and opportunity to carry the atmosphere,

the integration and the quickening and the love that we have received here, back into our homes and our communities. And think on these things that St. Paul told us about. And it is wonderful. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. Amen.