where she worked in the fashion industry. It was there that she met
her handsome, blue-eyed husband, Morris Townsend. The
Townsends moved among many important and accomplished peo-
ple in Manhattan. Morris’s career in finance propelled him from one
rung of success to another, including being named national director
of the United States Treasury.
But financial success is no buffer for real tragedy, as the
Townsends discovered when Josephine became gravely ill. A series
of surgeries removed large sections of her intestines, and she lay for
weeks in intense pain. As Josephine spent her days and nights under
an oxygen tent, many times she awoke to find Morris in prayer by
her bedside.
But the Lord was her closest companion, and his Word was con-
stantly on her mind. Closer than her heartbeat were the precious
scriptural prayers her mother had paid her to memorize many years
before. Those words were her weapons and her comfort.
“Heal me, O LORD, and I will be healed,” she would pray. “Save
me and I will be saved.”
Josephine was indeed healed and saved, and she spent more than
twenty years traveling and telling of God’s miraculous work in her
life. Even after Morris’s death when she was in her seventies, she
moved to Mobile to bless many of us by teaching us the importance
of learning and praying the Scriptures. She never missed an oppor-
tunity to remind us that it was the prayers of the Bible that had saved
her life!
Father God, thank you for the precious gift of your Word. Let me see
it as the treasure that it is. I welcome it, and you, into my heart
today. In Jesus’ name, amen.101 MOST POWERFUL PRAYERS IN THE BI BLE 145