Our friend Harold had worked for many years in the prison service, and he had many stories to tell of opportunities taken to share the good news of God’s love and grace.                                                            But before he went into the prison service, he was working at selling life insurance. As he was going on his rounds in a certain area, he heard of a family who was wanting to take out life insurance on some of their family members. He decided to make them a call and see if he could help in this way at all. When he knocked on the door, a lady answered it and she appeared to be in tears.                                      “I’m awfully sorry,” Harold said, “I seem to have come at a bad time. I’ll come back another day.”                                                                                      “No, no”, she said, “I really need someone to talk to.”                                             And so the  sad story came out. Her marriage had just broken up, she said, and her husband had taken the two older girls, leaving her with two young sons. Harold listened sympathetically for a while, and said, “Well, there’s not much I can do to help, but do you have a Bible in the house?”                                                                                                                “Yes, there is one here,” she said, “It belongs to one of the boys,” and she went off to get it.                                                                                                                 Harold took it, and showed her one or two verses. After he had been talking for a while, she said that she had been going to church for over twenty-one years and never realised that she needed to have personal dealings with God. She could see now what she had been missing out on. Harold was not one to ever miss an opportunity, so he asked her if she would like to pray the sinner’s prayer of confession of sin. She was glad to do this and became a new person in spite of her continuing bad circumstances.                                 Harold lost touch with her after that, and eighteen years later, two women came into the prison where he was working to visit an inmate. Harold immediately recognised the older lady as this same person.                                                                                                                                              He reminded her of this occasion and asked her how things had been with her over the intervening years. Her face lit up, and she told him how one of her boys was now serving as a Youth Pastor in a church in Australia.

This story bears out the verse that says…..Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning…Psalm 30:5b