Praise Him, Praise Him, All Ye Little Children

A friend recently told me about how she reads Bible stories to her children in the evening before bedtime.  “They are so little,” she said. “I wonder if they will even remember anything at all.”  My response to her was to keep it up.  “You never know what will stick.”

 

I thought about this conversation last week when I was re-reading one of my favorite books, Evidence Not Seen, by Darlene Deibler Rose.  It is the true account of a young missionary in Papua New Guinea who spent four years as a war prisoner in Japanese concentration camps during World War II.  At one point, she was confined for months in solitary confinement in a tiny windowless cell.  The only human contact she had was when she was initially interrogated by the prison administrators who were determined that she was a spy.  Months passed.  What kept her grounded and from literally losing her mind?  She was amazed at how she remembered Scripture and songs that she had learned as a young child…songs, she said, that she didn’t even know that she had memorized.  They came back in a flood as a comfort to her.  In her words:

p. 143 As a child and young person, I had had a driving compulsion to memorize the written Word. In the cell I was grateful now for those days in Vacation Bible School, when I had memorized many single verses, complete chapters, and Psalms, as well as whole books of the Bible. In the years that followed, I reviewed the Scriptures often. The Lord fed me with the Living Bread that had been stored against the day when fresh supply was cut off by the loss of my Bible. He brought daily comfort and encouragement – yes, and joy – to my heart through the knowledge of the Word.

 

So, dear mothers and grandmothers, keep singing those songs, keep them memorizing those verses, keep reading Bible stories as well as stories of the heroes of the faith.  They are listening.  They are learning and absorbing and bonding to the Father.  And God is putting yet another tool in their toolbox for the years to come when they may need it most.