Some
of you may have the book, A MAN
CALLED PETER. I’ve read it and have seen the movie based upon the book.
It
was written by Peter Marshall’s widow, Catherine. He was an amazing
preacher—one of the most influential in the twentieth century. His most famous
pulpit was in Washington DC, but he also ministered to the U. S. Senate as its
chaplain.
The
movie portrays Marshall speaking to a regiment of midshipmen at the U.S. Naval
Academy in Annapolis. He was addressing the December graduating
class. Sensing the need to change his message, he switched his text to James 4:14: For
what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time and
then vanisheth away.
Marshall
included the following story in his sermon. Watching the movie, I got goose
bumps; what I share is the story as recorded in the book:
In
a home of which I know, a little boy—the only son—was ill with an incurable
disease. Month after month the mother had tenderly nursed him, read to him, and
played with him, hoping to keep him from realizing the dreadful finality of the
doctor’s diagnosis.
But
as the weeks went on and he grew no better, the little fellow gradually began
to understand that he would never be like the other boys he saw playing outside
his window and, small as he was, he began to understand the meaning of the term
death, and he, too, knew that he was to die.
One
day his mother had been reading to him the stirring tales of King Arthur and
his Knights of the Round Table: of Lancelot and Guinevere and Elaine, the lily
maid of Astolat, and of that last glorious battle in which so many fair knights
met their death.
As
she closed the book, the boy sat silent for an instant as though deeply stirred
with the trumpet call of the old English tale, and then asked the question that
had been weighing on his childish heart: “Mother, what is it like to die?
Mother, does it hurt?”
Quick
tears sprang to her eyes and she fled to the kitchen supposedly to tend to
something on the stove. She knew it was a question with deep significance. She
knew it must be answered satisfactorily. So she leaned for an instant against
the kitchen cabinet, her knuckles pressed white against the smooth surface, and
breathed a hurried prayer that the Lord would keep her from breaking down
before the boy and would tell her how to answer him.
And
the Lord did tell her. Immediately she knew how to explain it to him.
“Kenneth,”
she said as she returned to the next room, “you remember when you were a tiny
boy how you used to play so hard all day that when night came you would be too
tired even to undress, and you would tumble into mother’s bed and fall asleep?”
“That
was not your bed…it was not where you belonged. And you stayed there only a
little while. In the morning, much to your surprise, you would wake up and find
yourself in your own bed in your own room. You were there because someone had
loved you and taken care of you. Your father had come—with big strong arms—and
carried you away. Kenneth, death is just like that. We just wake up some
morning to find ourselves in the other room—our own room where we
belong—because the Lord Jesus loved us.”
The
lad’s shining, trusting face looking up into hers told her that the point had
gone home and that there would be no more fear … only love and trust in his
little heart as he went to meet the Father in Heaven.
In
the movie, you see Marshall driving back to Washington that morning after the
sermon. It was then that he heard the announcement on the radio that Pearl
Harbor had been bombed.
Many
of those young men were soon sent to war. Some were soon dead.
With
spiritual prescience, Marshall prepared those boys for what was to come.
Death
will be here all-to-quickly for all of us. We will be ready?
