VISION TO IDENTIFY YOUR MIRACLE

VISION TO IDENTIFY YOUR MIRACLE

 

 

Baba said, "It is my special characteristic to free any person, who surrenders completely to me, and who worships Me faithfully, and who remembers Me, and meditates on Me constantly" in Sri Sai Satcharitra, Ch.III.

 

Sometimes the answer to prayer comes in the form of a revelation. Nothing is changed but you. But you are altered utterly, even as a blind man's sight is restored. And there is your answer, so obvious, yet so striking, you are half convinced it could not have been there yesterday.

 

John Baldwin spent all he owned trying to found Lyceum Village, a village dedicated to learning. It went bankrupt, leaving him mortgaged and in danger of losing everything.

 

John Baldwin was a deeply religious man, so for 30 days he went out into a solitary grove to make a covenant with God. Then on the 30^th day, as he was coming home, he noticed ledge of peculiar rock he had never before seen. Reaching down, he picked up a slab.

 

"I examined the texture," he wrote, "the quality of grit. I took out my pocket-knife and found the stone would put a keen edge on steel!"

 

Before the sun was down, John Baldwin had shaped the rock into grindstone. Here was answer! It lead to the founding of the highly successful Berea grindstone industry.

 

Then close on the heels of his first discovery, Baldwin conceived of a lathe. It, too, proved successful, and riches poured on him, enabling him to fulfill his part of the covenant by establishing a co-educational college in Berea, and in Kansas, Louisiana and India.

 

In this last miracle, the reply to prayer was merely a sharpening of john Baldwin's vision, enabling him to see what had always been there. How ordinary a reply to be termed a miracle. Yet without that vision, Baldwin might never have seen the materials at hand, and so might never have succeeded.

 

 

 

(Written by E. F. Wells in Mira May-June 2004)