TWICE-BORN MEN
REMARKABLE CONVERSIONS OF WELL-KNOWN MEN
IN DIFFERENT AGES AND IN VARIED RANKS OF LIFE
Compiled by HY. PICKERING
Author of ” Thinking Black “
DAN CRAWFORD, Central African Missionary and Pioneer, who spent many years in the “long grass,” thus wrote the story of his new birth:
“I am thinking of a quiet Sunday night in the month of May. The scene is the village of Gourock on the Clyde, and a humble little meeting-place with white-washed walls well covered over with Gospel texts. The meeting that night was a small one, and I was there for the first time. I was afraid some of my companions might see me going into the meeting-room and raise a laugh at me. I remember so well taking a winding route round by the back of the hall, then climbing over a wall, and at last reaching the little meeting-place. I was indeed anxious to be saved. For one long fortnight God had been convincing me of sin, and oh! my misery was intense. My sore distress was at the thought of meeting God. During that fortnight I had got a glimpse of what I was and the Sunday night which closed the fortnight found me at my very worst. A working man that night told the simple story of a Saviour’s love, but the close of his address found me, as at the beginning, still dreading the wrath of God. I seemed riveted to my seat and could not rise when the meeting dismissed. I waited on until some one came to point me Christwards. For a long time we talked, but I seemed chained with doubts. Never did I realise before how thoroughly I was Satan’s captive. Great volumes of doubt rushed into my soul.
“We had stood thus for nearly an hour, when one dear man of God, taking a lead pencil from his pocket, stooped down and drew on the floor a thick black line between the door and where I stood. Rising, he deliberately said: ‘Dan, you won’t step over that line until you have trusted Christ. Everything seemed so terribly real to me that moment. Heaven and Hell: Christ and the world: I must make a choice. It pressed upon me that I was making God a liar, and that if I crossed that line a Christ-rejecter, perhaps God might call me to judgment that hour. We stood there before God, I in the balance between life and death, they pressing me to accept Christ. At twenty minutes past ten o’clock, by grace I crossed the line. ‘The light of the glorious Gospel’ shone in, and that hour I began to live. 0 happy hour! Jesus was mine, and I was His. 0 the ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory’ which flows to me from the knowledge that Christ is mine, mine to save, and mine to satisfy, mine even now, and mine for ever.”
There were no half-measures with Dan Crawford. He immediately confessed Christ as his Saviour and served Him as Lord and Master. At once he became a missionary at home, and later on followed in the footsteps of those noble men of God, David Livingstone and F.S. Arnot, and finally he settled down at Luanza, on Lake Mwera, in Central Africa. From then he had but one object in life—to win the African to Christ, and as a result of his life of 37 years’ service, it is quite a common sight to see some thousands of Ethiopia’s sons, saved by the grace of God, sitting for hours on end, listening to the ministry of the Word of God.