Our Father we thank you for this glorious day. We thank you that we can be here to think together and study together and we pray that you'll be teaching us. Again, Father we desire to learn your mind for our own lives and for our own ministries to other people as we look at one example of a couple you raised up to be your children and to be your servants in our generation. So Father we pray that you will help us and give us understanding and show us where we can learn to follow their example as they followed yours and not in any other way. So Father be with us we ask in Jesus name. Amen. Now we had reached the point in our last session where the shapers were just moving to Wilmington, Delaware to study at Faith Seminary. We were discussing at the end the sad split that took place within the new Presbyterian church divided into now two seminaries and two denominations with the one half going off to form Faith Seminary in Wilmington, Delaware. And the Bible Presbyterian church and Dr. McCray was the president of the new seminary and Dr. Led Harris who later joined the faculty here at Covenant was teaching there and so was George Seville. He did shape his father father. He was teaching Greek and missions there. It's interesting to look at the list Edith Gibbs of some of the students who were there. Many of whom mean a great deal to the history of the Reform Presbyterian church and also the PCA now. As well as Francis Shafer there were Doug and John Young, John Sanderson Art Glasser, Walter Cross, Homer Emerson, Jack Murray, various other men who were studying there at that time. As well as being one of the students at the new seminary, Shafer was tremendously involved in the setting up of the campus. He was asked to go with Edith to Wilmington to find a campus for the new seminary, basically to find houses for the faculty to find a dormitory for the students, to find rooms for the classes and so on. He went with almost no money. I think they had $40 of their own to put down as a sort of down payment on the rent of these buildings and they found four buildings very close to each other and put $10 down on each of them. Then it was his job to try and equip all these houses and rooms with everything from washbasins and toilets to cookers and refrigerators and everything else. When they had almost no money to do it on and so he went around junkyards, all around the city, finding things that were being thrown away or cost virtually nothing and got together a whole truckload of stuff to get the seminary started. In the middle of all this, their first child was being born. That was Priscilla in the middle of that summer as they went through the move. Edith's recants are very amusing story in some ways of how everything was just totally chaotic and Francis Schaeffer, who had in some ways quite a short temper, just getting absolutely furious with her, with the baby, with the junkyards in which they were getting the stuff who tried to cheat him and the traffic and absolutely everything else. In the middle of all this, I can't remember what finally the last straw was. He realized that God was teaching him a lesson, a lesson in patience and forbearance and not just rushing around actively at everything but really being prepared to depend upon him. Suddenly in the middle of it all, when the last thing happened, which was the final straw and Edith and the mother who was with them thought, now this is going to be really it. Now he's really going to lose his cool totally. He just said, or, right, Lord, I'm sorry, it's enough. He realized that God was disappointing him for his impatience and for his lack of forbearance at difficult situations and he learned a very important lesson then, which stayed with him throughout his life in terms of how you cope with stress and strain and difficulties that come your way. And that sometimes we have to be prepared to simply endure those things and just getting furious with the angry with other people and with the situation and with God, just as not the way to deal with them. He graduated the next year in the summer of 1938. He'd been a straight-8 student. He was the first new pastor to be ordained in the Bible Presbyterian Church. A song they sang at his graduation was something which stayed with him and Edith throughout their life. It was give tongues of fire to preach thy word. And she recounts how at that graduation, as they sang that hymn, it began to be her prayer from that time on that God would give him a tongue of fire to preach his word and the God would never let that fire cool off, that it would be with him throughout his life, throughout his ministry, that he would be able to speak God's word with a tongue of fire. His first pastorate, he was ordained into the pastorate that summer and was straight after seminary, was in the covenant Presbyterian Church in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He went there in May 1938, right after graduation. As she says, there was now a new category, a sort of uncomfortable, invisible line separating the two of them from everybody else. That uncomfortable line, that invisible line was the reverent and Mrs. Francis Schaeffer. And she realized immediately the way people began to treat you differently, once you were in that position of being ordained, and it was something that neither of them enjoyed, and which they always worked against, just desiring to be not set up on a pedestal regarded any differently from anybody else. And sadly, there, I think one of the areas where we really have forgotten one of the central teachings of the Reformation is Lupa's emphasis on the priesthood of all believers. And while we may pay lip service to that in our traditions, sadly very often in many, many evangelical churches, and ministers are set up as a kind of new priest. And it's that that creates that uncomfortable, invisible, dividing line which sets people off that they sort of put in a separate holy category, something we really need to work against. They were at that little church in Grove City for three years from 1938 to 1941. It was tiny when they went there. It was a brand new little Bible Presbyterian church. There were 18 people who had left the big liberal Presbyterian church in the town and were meeting in the American Legion Hall. Shaffer was paid $100 a month. That was for everything inclusive. Their rent of $36 a month had to come out of that, left them $5 a week for food. So they were living on a fairly skimpy budget. It was a little apartment next door to the American Legion Hall. And she recants the very first sermon that he preached there. And that's why I handed out this page here, page 204, from the tapestry. How every week as he preached she would pray for him. And what she says is worth reading out in full because it's very moving and it's also tremendously important. For those of you who are going to be pastors or pastors' wives, it's a tremendously important word. She says, what about the pastors' wife? For me I felt my very big responsibility, along with caring for Priscilla, their first child, was never to stop praying for fantasy preached. I felt keen that it was up to me to pray for the power of the Holy Spirit, for the Lord's words to be given, for the message to really touch not only others, but the speaker himself, speak to him and through him, was not just a formula of prayer, it became the cry of my heart. This was to continue through the years and it was very, very possible and practical. I know because now I have 45 years behind me, for me to continue that prayer no matter what, even if we just had a fight of some sort before he spoke. Very possible and practical for me to sit under the word of God, really forgetting anything personal, to listen to what was coming forth and to be thankful that Fran was hearing this, as well as to hear it myself. In the hope of helping some new young pastors' wife, I would say that it is imperative never to sit thinking, how can he say that when he's just been so unreasonable? One of the things I enjoy about this book is the way Edith is so refreshingly honest about the difficulties of their relationship, it's something sadly that's very rare in Christian biographies and autobiographies. It is imperative really to believe that God is able to speak through the one for whom we pray and able to speak through us ourselves or we ask him to, and at the same time to know that the speaker is being spoken to. To feel that no one can preach who has not been perfect in the area in which he is preaching about is to miss the reality of the truth of what fallen human beings are like and what the word of God is like. To grow, to strive for reality, to call out the Lord for forgiveness and to seek to live in the light of His Word are of course important. But perfection is not to be reached in the land of the living, though we are called to teach a perfect message which has come from the perfect God. Now those words are tremendously profound because it's very easy, I think, in a marriage or in any situation where we know somebody really closely to think how can this person say these things? I know for myself in preaching sometimes one can't help but feel hypocritical about some of the things that one is saying. But what I always do is feel that first of all I'm preaching to myself and only then to other people so that everything I pray that everything I prepare is for me to hear first and then others. In other words, in preparing when it's sitting under the word of God oneself, I'm not just thinking that's what those people need to hear, I'm thinking this is what I need to hear, me today. And I think if that is one's mentality, it's going to come across in one's message because the preacher is not up there pointing the finger at people saying this is who you are to be, there is some humility that comes across in the message. This is what we all need to hear, me too. And with that it makes it very much easier for the position like Edith here, the wife or a friend, someone who knows the preacher for a person, the one's children, to be able to really pray even if you've had a fight, even if you've been arguing about something to the last moment before you left the car before you entered the church. And because of course that is the human situation we find ourselves in because there is no one who isn't a sinner who doesn't have family fights sometimes, difficulties, arguments, struggles of one kind and another. Sunday morning can be tremendously chaotic as you get yourself ready to go off to church with your family and there has to be the preparedness to forget all that and to really pray for God's work to be done in the situation. And to sit under the word oneself. So I think her words there are tremendously helpful. So there he was, the pastor of this little church, this new church. It didn't even have any children. The church was so small that the parents felt that their children had to keep going to the Sunday school class in the big church from which they come because they needed to have a larger group to, to be with on Sunday morning so there were just 18 adults at the beginning of that little church. What did they do there in Grove City? What form did his ministry take starting with a tiny group like that? His first thought was to begin to reach out to children and I want first to make some points about that, about their work with children. They didn't have one child, so what were they going to do? He decided that what he would do, first of all, would be to just have a hot dog roast. So he went out in his car, he saw some kids playing by the side of the street and he said to them, would you like to come to a hot dog roast? As two or three boys and they said, yes, you're great. So he said, right, take me hop in my car and take me to your friends. And so they went and they went out and they gathered up a carload of kids. They found 17, the first occasion he found and they squashed 17 kids into their, into their modellé into his modellé Ford. And he bought them back, of course, these were children from non-Christian homes. He bought them back, gave them a hot dog roast and talked to them about the creation and the fall. And from that evening onwards, he was called Rev by these kids, that was their affectionate name for him. And he started a boys group like that which met regularly, just these kids that he would find on the streets playing around, that he would bring back. They decided that first summer but they would immediately have a summer Bible school. Again, of course, the church had no children. What were they going to do? Well, he was going to direct the thing and do some teaching and edith and her mother came, Mrs. Seville came to help with teaching and some of the ladies from the church, they would help in various ways with it. Again, how were they going to get children? There's a wonderful passage in the book on page 205 to 206, where edith describes the visiting team, how they went out, and they got kids to come. He would gather the boys with him, who'd come to that first hot dog roast, and they'd go off in his car up and down the street, stopping at houses, wherever anybody knew somebody. He would go up to the door and introduce himself and say we're going to have a free Bible school. You know, your children are very welcome to come. They made various advertisements and so on. They didn't have any idea when the Bible school began, whether anybody would come at all, they had a two week Bible school. So on the first morning, they were tremendously apprehensive, just waiting there to see what would happen. But the Lord had really blessed that visiting from door to door and has to has, and on the very first morning, 79 children came, and by the end of the two weeks there were more than a hundred. Or through his ministry, or through their ministry, they were both tremendously gifted in working with children, and God really blessed that gift. So that was one part of their work. It was work with children, wherever they could do it. Eventually a Sunday school course, Sunday school, of course, developed. But it began with those hot dogs roast, hot dog roasts with boys club, and with the summer Bible school. A second aspect of their work there was with young people. At one summer, they'd met Mrs. Eleanor McCluskey from Atlanta, Georgia, who'd started high school work called the Miracle Book Club, and they became lifelong friends with her. And they started the Miracle Book Club in their home there in Grove City, reaching out to high school kids. And each week, they had a group of kids coming into their house. Again, kids mostly from non-Christian homes who were coming to whom they talked, whom they brought along to their house and had fun with. For a little while, they moved to a larger house. They found an old house, a little out towards the country, which was basically falling down, worked on putting it back together, used their creativity in various ways. Their sofas were made from old car seats, the front seats of cars, which he put a wooden frame around, and she covered over with material. As he went around visiting people, he would pick up bits and pieces like an old butterbox lid, which she'd turned into a tray by burning a fruit pattern on it to match their curtains. They were always able to make something very nice with very little. No matter how little money they had, they would end up with a situation that was really beautiful, which people really enjoyed coming into, where they felt at home, where they felt welcomed, where they enjoyed to be. Another sort of building project he was involved in, as the church began to grow, they needed a place of their own, and he found a little church building that was going to be destroyed when a valley was flooded by dam, so he and the men from the church went out and took it apart and rebuilt it for their congregation. So the second aspect of their work was work with young people, and then in passing, just mentioning the creativity, which always was a part of both of their lives, and then a third thing, which is tremendously important in understanding how his ministry went, was his commitment to pastoral visiting. As he did, says this was something he was very gifted at, but which he kept working out over and over again. It's very easy for a pastor and a small church to really be basically lazy, because he wants what can I do? Among can just simply spend one's time sitting in the study, or maybe doing some bit studying, but in terms of actually getting out and building the church, sometimes little can be done, but he did an enormous amount of visiting, visiting the members of the church, who were of course only 18 to start with, but their relatives, anybody in need in the community that he heard about, he would go to visit, and he would visit regularly the parents of any of the children who were in the church. He would come to the hot dog roasts, to the boys club, he started to the summer Bible school, he would visit all of those families. One of the things that he started to do at that time, and it became a pattern of his whole life, was that when he was visiting people, he would often take work with him to do. He found that most people are much more prepared to really open up and talk about themselves and have really deep communication in a less formal setting than sitting down that Santa passed a study and talking to him face to face, so he would often take along a chair to sand or some work to do, so that as the farmer he was visiting was milking his cows, he was doing something there too, and he found people would be far more open that way. He would also often take their little baby girl, Priscilla, with him, and Edith recounts on how one occasion he came home, and she said, well where is Priscilla? And he's like, I don't know, she's only had to go back around all the houses that he visited that day and eventually found her still playing happily in someone's home, where he left to run the way, but again this was something he did for many years as take one of his children with him when he went on pastoral calls. So that was a third aspect of his ministry, this commitment to pastoral visiting, to really getting alongside people, to being prepared to talk with them very straight, the gospel, to talk with them about their own personal needs to pray with them. A fourth aspect of his ministry there, which I should just make a little passing note on, was his recognition, and we've seen this already in talking about their life together as they began to get together, and in Edith's background in particular, and that is a tremendous commitment to the value of prayer. And Edith recounts how there was one lady in the church who was suffering from multiple cirrhosis, who was tremendously ill, who could hardly move, and she had to be fed just liquid food, because she couldn't chew on anything solid, now all her muscles were breaking down. And how Francis Schaefer regarded her really as one of the most important members of the church, because she was constantly praying for people, he could go to her, and share with her the needs of people, particular needs of the church, areas of concern, and be sure that she was going to devote her days to praying for the needs of that congregation, and he genuinely regarded her as one of the most important people in that congregation. Again for him, and I mentioned this before, there were no insignificant people, no people who have no part to play in the life of God's people, and again, just thinking about prayer, they carried on praying fervently for his family, that it was during their time in Grove City, that his father was converted. It happened after his father had a stroke one day, and he sent it immediately for his son, and when he got there, the very first thing he said was, son, tell me about this Jesus you believe in, it was them, they sat down together, and he was able to really share with him, he talked with him many times before, but to share with him, and his father became a Christian, at that point, and from that point onwards really was alongside them in the world. The work they were doing, his father's mentality changed, instead of regarding his son as a drone and a parasite because he was a minister, he was now someone who was really committed to what he was doing, and supported him in any way that he could, help the mad as a family in one way or another. The next point I want to make here, I guess that's point number five, is the church grew, the Lord really blessed his efforts in visiting and in reaching out to kids and to young people, and within the three years of their time there, the church had grown to 110 members with new people, unbelievers coming every Sunday. They were only there for three years, not because that was what he had planned, but because one of the elders at one point made the remark that he felt that a pastor says all that he's got to say in three years, and after that it's time to move on. And sadly, that sometimes that is true, if a pastor simply gives out what he learned in seminary after three years he usually has given everything he's got to say, and then he goes on somewhere else and says the same things over again. Of course it shouldn't be that way, but Schaefer was very young, of course this is his first pastorate, and so he felt well perhaps this is what he should do. When this remark was made, so even though they'd become tremendously close to all those people and had a really flourishing work, he felt perhaps that he ought to move on. And again, I should make the point here that he was tremendously hard working. I was sharing this morning with Mrs. Mojano, who was his secretary in St. Louis, and when we get to that section I'll have to share some of the things that she said to me with you. But we were laughing together about how difficult it was to work for him because he worked so hard, and he expected everybody who worked with him to work incredibly hard too. And I'll just mention one little story that she mentioned. She said she would sometimes babysit their children when he was out speaking somewhere in an evening and they'd come back, and even if it was two o'clock in the morning he'd say to her about some dictation, and he would dictate a few letters before she went home. So I heard to type up the next morning, and my wife was his secretary at 1.2 and she would be totally in sympathy with the stories like that because she would have many to recount herself about the times that his demands for work from those who worked with him seemed completely unreasonable. But it was never because he expected other people to work hard, but didn't work hard himself, was just simply what he was always doing himself, just working tremendously hard, and that had an effect on everybody around him. And they had to also, they left that church then in 41 Grove City, and went from there to Chester, Pennsylvania, where he became associate pastor in a very much larger church, right around the time of their move, their second child, Susan was born. Also during this period he'd become moderator of the Great Lakes Presbytery of the Bible Presbyterian Church, but they moved in 41 to Chester, Pennsylvania to a Bible Presbyterian Church there. So they moved to Chester, Pennsylvania. This church was very much larger, it had about 500 people. The pastor was a doctor, Al Latham, who was in his 70s, and Schaefer went there as the associate pastor. Again, this was a church this time, a large one that had come out of the main Presbyterian Church because of liberalism, as usual they had lost their building, so had no building, the denomination had taken it, and so they were meeting in an old mill. As he wasn't the main pastor in this place, his work was rather varied, he preached on Sunday evenings, and spent an enormous amount of time doing pastoral visiting again, and working with young people in Bible clubs, in some of Bible school, and so on. Just a couple of points I want to make here in commenting on his ministry in this place, really what I'm trying to do as we go along is to pick out things, which tell us something about how their ministry was going to develop, areas where they were gifted, things that they were committed to, and to see how God in a way was shaping them, and shaping the gifts he'd given them, and the experience they were having for the work that was to come later, and of course God is always doing that with all of us. There are patches of our life where we wonder what value will this have, but in the providence of God he is going to use it at some point in our future, we may be quite sure, we have no idea when that will be, how it will be, and we must be careful not to insist, well, because I've had this training, I've had this experience, therefore I must do this right now, but to rather be prepared to put ourselves in God's hands and say, Lord, I'm prepared to do what you call me to do, and I'll leave the working out of how all these things come together, into your hands because you're the Lord of my personal history, I'm not, but just a couple of points to make here. The first is that in his pastored in this church, he was working with a tremendously wide range of people, as it was a bigger city church like this, of course there were some people who you could call intellectuals, there were university students who would come to them with the questions raised, come to him with their questions raised by their study, and he was prepared to sit down endlessly and talk to them. At the same time he spent a great deal of his time visiting and talking with shipyard workers. There were many people like that in that church, and he felt perfectly comfortable with people like that, not simply with intellectuals. I think at the time they would have been astonished if anybody said he is a person who only reaches intellectuals, or who is the sort of minister to intellectuals, because this certainly wasn't true, it never was at any point in his life, and again it's a misunderstanding which arises from looking at the books and thinking that his whole ministry was that kind of output. But a huge cross-section of people, and he just mentions this in the book, appreciated his preaching in the church, people who were from all walks of life who would say you can always understand him in his preaching, and you learn so much when he preaches. He spent a lot of time working with neglected children, as they now had a ministry in a city there, and he spent time working with children with dance syndrome. For him it never really mattered who the person was, that he was seeking to serve, whether they were a university professor or a child with dance syndrome, if he was the person who God put in his path, then he was a person who he was called to serve and be helpful to, and he'd his recents, how he would go along twice a week to teach a little boy who had dance syndrome, and eventually another child started coming too, just working with colored blocks, helping the child in his development, and how both these children with dance syndrome, because it came a little class of two, really began to progress during the time he spent with them, and he regarded that as just as important as anything else that he was doing. So working with all sorts of people, he spent quite a lot of time in the bars in Chester, going into them and talking to men there about the gospel, and sometimes dragging them home before they spent their whole week's wages on drink, but visiting, working alongside all sorts of people again. When they built a new church there, for this church in Chester, he helped design it, he had some talent in that area from his background in mechanical engineering and technical drawing and so on, he helped design it, and then worked alongside the men of the church on the scaffolding as they built it. The second thing I want to mention about that time in the church there was a summer camp that they did in their first year there. This was a Bible camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and it was rather different from any Bible camp they'd been to before. They planned that it would be for all ages, so they had tiny children, right down to babies, up to people in their 60s, 118 people went to the camp. It was a two week camp, and Edith says this was something which we saw later as what was called the integration of the ages, that it's not good just to constantly separate people off into age groups. But in our churches too, people need to be integrated together to have family experience of people of all ages, all different kinds of people together. This group of people included many children who've never been in the countryside before in their lives, for whom that time out in the Blue Ridge Mountains was the highlight of their whole life. Just before they left, they discovered the cook could not come, and Edith had her first experience of cooking for a large number of people, and so she just said, well I will do it, and she cooked with the assistance of some of the other women for these 118 people. If you read this section in the tapestry, she really worked making it creative. This was something she always did. When she was preparing food, the kitchen may be left in total chaos, and I could testify to that having worked in her kitchen for a year. The kitchen may be left in total chaos, but where people were eating was always beautiful. Everything would be beautifully set out, even if there wasn't much money to spend, the food would be nicely prepared, would look wonderful on the plate, it would be a situation which people could really sit down and relax, feel comfortable, feel welcomed, feel loved, and feel cared for in the situation because of the amount of care that had gone into that preparation, her first experience of that in a big way, which certainly helped her in terms of what happened in La Brea over the years later, was cooking for those 118 people in that camp, working creatively with the budget she had. She comments that some of the people enjoyed that camp so much, they didn't want to leave it, they wanted it to go on forever. And of course, along with all that kind of family atmosphere, which they worked at making, there was lots of fun, and hiking, and Bible studies, and everything else was going on at the same time. A third point I want to make here was something which began to be a concern for him, and that was how do the Lords people spend the Lords money? Are we going to do the Lords work in the Lords way? The church there in Chester built a large new church, which was going to be adequate for the needs of the church for many years to come, but immediately some people in the church wanted to start building an even bigger building, so that that first building would eventually just become the Sunday school rooms, and something even bigger would be done. And Chaefer began to have very serious reservations about that kind of approach. I'm feeling there are so many desperate needs for the money that the Lords people give, should they be just spent on building brick and mortar that really aren't needed at the present time, in the hopes that we're going to have some even bigger thing at some point in the future. So they were there at Chester just for a couple of years, and they moved on from Chester to St. Louis to here in St. Louis, where he became pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church here, what later became Covenant Church, so they were there in Chester from 41 to 43. So that was the third point to make there, is concern over the way money is spent, the concern over the way we begin to think of the buildings that we're putting up, what sort of importance do they have, not that we don't need them, where our priority is going to be, in terms of both how we do the Lords work, that we really pray for his direction, that we give our money to him for his control, and so on, that kind of concern, that it's so easy for the Church to become a place where one is in a sense building an empire in one form or another, building a castle. Fourthly, a fourth point I want to make here again, is their commitment to the seriousness of prayer, and the seriousness of talking to people, whoever they are, whatever their situation, that we need to have a sense of urgency about the task that is before us, both in communicating with people and in depending upon God for what we're going to do. He just describes how when his father, when Francis's father died after being in a coma for several days, how all through the time that he was in the coma, they carried on praying with him, talking with him, reading the Bible to him, even though they had no idea whether he was hearing them or not. Now this was something that I've heard him say over and over again, but even if the doctors say to you, if you're doing hospital visiting this person, can't understand if they can't hear you, there's no point in talking to them, they are basically just have become, one of these horrible expressions that sometimes used a vegetable, there's nothing there any longer, Shafers actually does always don't take any notice, you just go and you spend time with them, you love them, you say encouraging things, you care for them, you carry on speaking to them, and he did this, they did this with his own father. But this was something he would stress over and over again, and I had a very striking confirmation of his encouragement to do this with a friend of ours in England. This was a girl when you were very well, who was a nurse, and one day she was driving through London, and she felt that she was going to have some kind of, she felt some kind of hemorrhage coming on, and she was able to drive herself to a hospital, the hospital where she worked, climb out of the car and then she collapsed on the steps, and she had a brain hemorrhage, she was taken into the hospital and she went into a coma for several months. And I talked with her afterwards about what it was like, because during that period she could make absolutely no indication that she could understand or was aware of anything, and the doctors didn't think she was aware of anything, she couldn't move her eyes to give any kind of indication that she was seeing anything, or hearing anything, or understanding anything, she had no control over her body at all, and she said all through that time she was totally aware of everything that was happening. And very particularly because she became acutely conscious, because she couldn't do anything else except be conscious, she became acutely conscious of the way people treated her, that some people came into that room, and just regarded her as a blob of matter, who was just there on the bed, to be dealt with, to be moved around, to be fed and watered, but to have no compassion for, no concern over her, and other people who came in, who really regarded her as a person. And even though there was no longer any sign of a person being present, who still cared for her, who were encouraging to her, who spoke to her as if she could hear, even though they didn't know whether she could, are people who communicated to her. And she said the very worst thing that happened, and the whole time was the day that she began to come back, so to speak, to begin to have control over herself. A doctor came into the room just a few minutes after she began to regain consciousness and not consciousness, but regain control, and he saw that she was crying, and this was the first side of any kind of physical reaction at all, and he realized what was happening, and he immediately put her in a wheelchair, and wheeled her into a class of medical students as an object lesson, in a rather than sitting down with her and saying, you know, it's so wonderful to see what's happening, you know, he just treated her as something to be displayed. And this is a tremendous temptation to all of us, I'm not making a point here about the medical profession, but how do we treat people who are severely disabled, particularly people who, don't appear to be responsive, we have really no way of knowing whether they are or not, no in her particular case, she came back from such a situation like that, and all the time she had been aware. But this was something that Schaeffer thought was tremendously important, that our urgency of communicating with people is so great, that even if they don't appear to be able to physically respond, we have to keep on talking, and we have to keep on praying for the work of the Holy Spirit in them, because it's never too late until someone has died to communicate the truth to them, so we keep praying for God to be working in them. And the other point, just about prayer here, just one last little indication, is in their church there, a little girl became sick with an incurable tongue disease, and the doctors had said basically that she was going to die, but there was no hope at all, and the mother of the little girl asked Francis to come and pray with her, and this was something he was prepared to do and did over and over again throughout his life. He really took James chapter 5 seriously, and he came and got a little bottle of oil from Edith, he went with some of the elders of the church, and prayed for her, and she recovered from that day she started to recover until the disease was completely gone with the doctors having no explanation for it at all. Again, Edith makes some very important points here in writing about this, and that is that even though he did this, and on this occasion this child was healed, God chose to heal the child, but they never took that as something automatic, that you can sort of put some money, a prayer, and some oil into a slot machine, and God will answer in a certain way, it simply doesn't work that way, but sometimes God's answer is no. There is no healing, and sometimes his answer is yes, but we can't demand that God answer our prayers in certain ways. For him it was simply a matter of obedience to God's word, that God's word tells us to do this, and so we must be prepared to do it, and to really pray believing that God is able to heal, and sometimes he does as in that situation.