RESCUE THE PERISHING

Many large cities have places where the downtrodden, out of work and derelicts can come for a helping hand, a hot meal or maybe overnight lodging.  We may feel somewhat uncomfortable in these places and attempt to avoid them.  Maybe we doubt our spiritual strength or our ability to help.

Fanny Crosby was a tiny, blind lady who as most know wrote so many hymns, poems and songs under so many pseudonyms that the number is only estimated.  Yet for many years Fanny made regular visits to the New York Bowery Mission to help and to speak to the people there.  Here is her personal recollection of a visit in 1869.

“I was addressing a large company of working men one hot summer evening, when the thought kept forcing itself on my mind that some mother’s boy must be rescued that night or not at all.  I made a pressing plea that if there were a boy present who had wandered from his mother’s home and teaching, he would come to me at the close of the service.  A young man of eighteen came forward and said, ‘Did you mean me?  I promised my mother to meet her in heaven, but as I am now living, that will be impossible.’” Fanny Crosby had the opportunity to steer the young man to the right path!

That evening, the line, “Rescue the Perishing, Care for the Dying” came to her and she did not retire for the night until her text for the hymn RESCURE THE PERISHING, was ready for music…subsequently written by her longtime friend, William Doane.