never gone to bed in my life without saying a prayer; and I have never eaten a meal in
my life without first thanking God for it ... Have my prayers been answered? Thousands
of times!
I Prayed To God To Keep Me Out Of An Orphan's Home
By
Kathleen Halter
Housewife, 1074 Roth, University City 14, Missouri
As a little child, my life was filled with horror. My mother had heart trouble. Day after
day, I saw her faint and fall to the floor. We all feared she was going to die, and I
believed that all little girls whose mothers died were sent to the Central Wesleyan
Orphans' Home, located in the little town of Warrenton, Missouri, where we lived. I
dreaded the thought of going there, and when I was six years old I prayed constantly:
"Dear God, please let my mummy live until I am old enough not to go to the orphans'
home."
Twenty years later, my brother, Meiner, had a terrible injury and suffered intense pain
until he died two years later. He couldn't feed himself or turn over in bed. To deaden his
pain, I had to give him morphine hypodermics every three hours, day and night. I did this
for two years. I was teaching music at the time at the Central Wesleyan College in
Warrenton, Missouri. When the neighbours heard my brother screaming with pain, they
would telephone me at college and I would leave my music class and rush home to give
my brother another injection of morphine. Every night when I went to bed, I would set
the alarm clock to go off three hours later so I would be sure to get up to attend to my
brother. I remember that on winter nights I would keep a bottle of milk outside the
window, where it would freeze and turn into a kind of ice-cream that I loved to eat. When
the alarm went off, this ice cream outside the window gave me an additional incentive to
get up.
In the midst of all these troubles, I did two things that kept me from indulging in self-pity
and worrying and embittering my life with resentment. First, I kept myself busy teaching
music from twelve to fourteen hours a day, so I had little time to think of my troubles;
and when I was tempted to feel sorry for myself, I kept saying to myself over and over:
"Now, listen, as long as you can walk and feed yourself and are free from intense pain,
you ought to be the happiest person in the world. No matter what happens, never forget
that as long as you live! Never! Never!"
I was determined to do everything in my power to cultivate an unconscious and
continuous attitude of gratefulness for my many blessings. Every morning when I
awoke, I would thank God that conditions were no worse than they were; and I resolved
that in spite of my troubles I would be the happiest person in Warrenton, Missouri.
Maybe I didn't succeed in achieving that goal, but I did succeed in making myself the
most grateful young woman in my town-and probably few of my associates worried less
than I did.
This Missouri music teacher applied two principles described in this book: she kept too
busy to worry, and she counted her blessings. The same technique may be helpful to
you.