The Midnight Message - Peter Hoover | KFW 2019

Father God, just bless Brother Peter right now as he shares a message. Lord, anoint him with Your Spirit. Just bless him abundantly for his courage to come out tonight and share a message. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Praise God.

So I guess we are already into the new day, so I'm very glad that we can be here together. And I must say that I was very blessed already by being with the people that are here, and particularly this last prayer and the last things that were talked about, about unity. That has been my theme for quite a while, and I've been trying to write about it and to talk about it, and the very thing about one church, one baptism, one truth, one way to go in order to live with Christ in new heavens and a new earth where righteousness will dwell. So hopefully tonight, even though we might think it's a big crowd—well, actually it's a small crowd—we are only a few people here tonight.

But at least if we are together and we are in unity and we are connected with our Lord Jesus Christ, and He is the one working through us, the sky is the limit. There's no end to what can happen out of these kinds of things. So I'm just very, very grateful to be with you. Now, if there's anything that's not going to work, it's going to be with me. But anyway, so here we go. So these kinds of things. So if all of a sudden it shuts out or whatever, you let me know. But in the meantime, I would like to have a scripture read here, and he's going to be doing my readings because I don't read that well anymore.

But maybe the first thing I'll have to admit is that I am to be talking about the midnight call or whatever it is. So maybe we can see if we can sing a song. And Curtis—by the way, you all know Curtis. Curtis Martin lives here close to where we now live, in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. And I would like if we could stand—can we stand and just sing one little song? And this is the beginning of the midnight.

You know that song, don't you? Okay. "Time is gliding like the shuttle of the weaver." How many of you know it? Can you put up your hands? Okay, let's sing that. "Time is gliding like the shuttle of the weaver, and the day swiftly passing by. If tonight should be the come of the bright room, are you ready for the midnight cry?

Oh, behold, the bright room cometh. What if now the sound of the sky would to meet him, rejoice or sorrow? Are you ready for the midnight cry?" Now you will sit down. "Are you ready for the midnight cry?" And you know where this comes from? It comes from all those virgins that were out there, and they were supposed to get ready for the bridegroom. Well, half of them never got ready. And in the end of it, they had a sad experience at the end. So anyway, that's a bit the context of what we are going to be talking about here tonight at midnight. And if you ever get tired or bored or whatever, we will see if we can sort of wake you up.

But I'm not sure exactly how, because I don't see very well, which is my biggest problem at this moment in time. But anyway, the kingdom of God is something that I want to talk about, and particularly about a part of the kingdom of God.

If somebody asked you, "What is the kingdom of God?" how would you describe it? Do you know when there were people that showed up with Jesus, and Jesus talked to them about the secret of the kingdom of God?

Sometimes He talked about the secret of the kingdom of the heavens. Now, you think I said that wrong. I didn't. It was the kingdom of the heavens. But whatever the case, it's the kingdom of God, the secret of the kingdom of God. So I want you to read that first scripture. You read that first scripture right now. You can do it right here, because it's coming right there. Read out loud.

The twelve and others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside, everything is seen in parables." All right. The secret of the kingdom of God. By the time we're done with this in an hour, I hope that we have a very clear understanding of what the kingdom of God actually is. There are two parts of the kingdom of God, and there's a bit of a mystery about it. And many of us have not either thought about it or maybe even discovered it. And so that's a little bit what I want to talk about behind this midnight thing that we're talking about.

Now I would like to read a little bit more some scriptures, but before that, we are having some heroes of faith to talk about. I would like to talk about two young men. Can you hear me? Does this thing work? Yeah. Okay. All right. So anyway, whatever the case, there are two young men that I knew about. I mean, they were before my time, but this was in the early 1700s in Germany. One of the young men was called Leonhard Doba. And he was a potter. They made clay pots in the southern part of Germany, which is close to a place called Heilbronn, or Heilbronn, Heidelberg, that area. And so many of our people here actually have ancestors at one point in time lived in that area.

It's the southern part of Germany. By the way, he was there, but he found his way through Germany, and he was converted, and he found his way into the Moravian community up in Lausitz, which is up in the far northeastern part of Germany, which is right next to Poland at this moment in time. So anyway, he went up there, started working in that Christian community at Herrnhut, and things went very well for him. But during that time, they had a big revival. And during that time, they got really interested in praying, praying during the night.

And they went out there on top of a hill that they call the Herrnhut. The Hutberg is right beside Herrnhut itself, the town of village, the village of Herrnhut. And then up in there, they had the Hutberg, which is like the hill of the watch, is what you can call it at this moment in time. I hope that many of you young men will eventually find their way to that place. It is still a very fascinating place. There are still many young people from all around the world, many of them African who are whatever, and they're coming together, and you still get there early in the morning. Just not that long ago, I was up there, and here I was out there and saw some boys out there praying out there amongst the trees.

And there's also a graveyard back there, and there's lots of people buried up in there. But whatever the case, they were out there, and I started talking to them eventually. And here they looked a little bit stumped by it and didn't exactly know what to say. And all of a sudden I realized they were not even speaking German, as it's in Germany. And then all of a sudden they talked to me in English, and they said, "Oh, they come from America. Oh, well, I can speak English too." And so I started talking with them in English. And here we had some beautiful time there praying together. And up on top of that hill, they have a little round thing that you can crawl up into it, and then you can walk around, and then you see all the country far and wide from top of the mountain.

And there you can be praying in every direction in the whole wide world. And that is what I often do in my mind still. I'm on top of this Hutberg, and I'm looking out over the whole wide world, looking at all these different things. But this Leonhard Doba was a man that came up there, and they started praying out there in the middle of the night. Exactly what you're doing now. Now, you're not on top of a big hill, and you're not doing fancy stuff as far as art looks and all that. But you are here, and we are praying during the night, and that's a wonderful thing. There's another young man that came as a refugee from Bohemia, which is Bohmen there in the southern part next to Moravia.

And he came up there. He was a teenager, and they were up there, and they started praying together. And you know what? They couldn't stop. They prayed. And they prayed more. And more. And more. And more people showed up. And it was one night after the next. It's during the night and in the summertime, and they came up, and they couldn't get stopped. And so here they were praying. Sometimes they just kept going on praying all night long. And this was the kind of prayer that don't think it's like an old fancy prayer of all sorts of elaborate things to say. It was just they were there. They were in the presence of the Lord.

And during that time, things started to happen. All night long. And then it got into the place where it went day and night. And then it went into week after week. Month after month. And do you know how long it lasted? Can anybody tell me? 100 years. 100 years. There it was. And during that time, around 100 years—well, anyway, it went on and on. It got a bit more organized over the time and so on. And Leonhard Doba and this other young man—this was Tobias Leopold was his name—and he was like a teenager. And they came together, and they learned about the black people down in St. Thomas in the West Indies during that time.

They met a black man from there. Started talking about it. And here one thing led to another, and they packed them off. And now we were talking this earlier this morning about planting churches and planting places and so on. Well, guess what? Back in those days, they made it very simple. They put people out. They gave them a couple of coins. They probably both of them might have had around $2 or $3 each between the two of them. They had no money. And they went out there, and they said, "You go out there and see if you can find you halfway around the world over to the West Indies." And so they went up there to Denmark, and it took about half a year until anybody got them into a boat, because they said, "It's crazy."

They said, "You can't go down there." They said, "Oh, we're going to go down there. We're going to work with the slaves." Well, they said, "No, you can't do that. You're white. You can't go down there and work with slaves." They said, "All right." Well, Doba, he knew how to make pottery, and the other guy was a carpenter. And he said, "Well, we'll go down there and we'll work as carpenters. Or whatever we're going to do, whatever we're going to do, we'll get there." And so eventually the Lord helped them down there. Well, actually, there was another boy who came first. He was named David Nietzschemann, who came first. And then Tobias came a little bit later on.

But whatever. They went down there. One thing led to another. And here eventually Tobias came down. He lasted about half a year, about six months, and he died. And many of their people just died as flies all over the place. They came over there. Families came down there, and they didn't last long at all. They got sick. It was hot. It was terrible. And here they got strange diseases. People came in there, burned their place down one after the next. Whatever. It was a very, very tough time. By the time that Leonhard Doba died a good number of years ago, can you give me a guess as to how many people, how many black African people were converted, found their way to the Lord, not just halfways, not just partially, not just doing silly things, but doing very important work amongst Him?

I have a number. I'm bad with numbers, but I have it right here. Let me think here. Okay. Can you give me a guess? 1,000. Way more. 100,000. No, not that many. It was 13,000. 13,000 Afro-American slaves were part of the church at this moment in time. And I am talking about the kind of people that were roundly converted. And they were people that were working as slaves out there in the middle of nowhere in the hot—and you know how it is, hot down there in the West Indies and so on. And by the time it was done, it was a thorough, ongoing church. And I know many of those people at this moment in time.

I've been there many times and right in that area. And here 100% of them are Afro-Americans, and all the way down into Guyana and Suriname and so on, and things are still happening now. It's not quite like it used to be anymore. But anyway. So I'll just give you a little bit of a thing, the story of an example. So don't think that just because you're a few people, you can do only a few things, that not much can happen. Out of the very few handful of people, the whole wide world has always been changed by just a few people. So don't worry about numbers. Just do faithfully what you can do, and things will go well.

Now I would like to share a few of the other scriptures that come along with it. And this is all about the kingdom and how that all went. But before that, I'll have to tell you a few more stories that go along with it.

My name is Peter Hoover. My great-grandfather was also called Peter Hoover, and I'm named after him. And of course, our family lived on just the north shore of Lake Erie. This is Lake a good number of years ago. And my great-grandfather, as a young man, went out there with his fiddle. He liked to play the fiddle very well. And he was also a sailor, because our congregation, which is the Reina Mennonite Church, was right on the north shore of Lake Erie. And I'm saying right smack dab on the north shore. It is so close that on the place where my great-grandpa lived and so on, you could sit on the porch and take an apple core and throw it into Lake Erie.

I mean, there you go. So it was like smack dab beside the water. In fact, it was so close. And the graveyard, the Hoover graveyard, is so on the water that eventually it washed out so bad that they even had to take the road from one side of the graveyard onto the other side, because it was washed into the lake. And even the graves themselves, probably some of them were gone too. And even the meeting house was burned down, but then they put it about a quarter mile in on my grandparents' place, which is a little bit in. And so that's the Reina Mennonite Church, which is possibly the oldest one in Canada. It would have been founded, that congregation, in the late 1790s.

And so it gives you a bit of an idea. Some of the people that came actually here from this Cumberland Valley. But whatever the case, so here was my great-grandpa, Peter Hoover. But he had his fiddle, and he liked to dance.

And so one night he was going over there to the neighbors, and he was going to see if somehow or another if he could just have a jolly time over there with his neighbors. And a lot of them were Irish and English, or whatever old they were, in that area. And so he went over there, but for some reason or another, the Lord inspired him that he should go and check the thing out and look into the window first. So he went over there, and it was dark already, and it was in the wintertime. And he went over there, peeped into the window, and here what he saw was a vision.

A very strange vision. All these people that were dancing, it looked like they were devils dancing around. It was horrible. It was so bad. Everybody was dancing around, and it just looked like a wicked, wicked, wicked situation. And it looked like they were all getting ready to be destroyed. And so he rushed back home, took his fiddle, smashed it. That was the end of the fiddle. And here he was part of a large, large family. He was the only—no, he and one sister were the only ones that stayed in sort of a conservative place that you could actually be very comfortable with. And he took a very serious approach. And he learned—he became like a very old man.

He was almost 90 years old when he died. And he was a faithful person. It was through my great-grandpa that I had this little link into something that happened many years ago. Later on, he had a boy—well, he was getting out married then—and then he had a boy. The first boy, he called him John. John died very quickly. Then he had a couple of girls. They had a girl called Charity, another one Elizabeth, another Marianne, and so on. But whatever. Down the road. But then he had, at the very end, they were going to have a little child. They didn't know it was going to be a boy or a girl, but they were going to have a child.

All of a sudden, my great-grandpa, Peter Hoover, was out in the barn, and he was working. And all of a sudden, the Spirit told him. The reason I'm telling you these things is because don't get rid of the idea that the Spirit will show you things. The Spirit will show you if you are willing to listen. Anyway, he was out in the barn. All of a sudden, the Spirit told him, "Go! Immediately! Go! Go somewhere. I'll show you." And so he rushed out of the barn. What was happening? He couldn't see anything. What's going on? And so he—and right away the Spirit told him, "Down to the spring house." He went down to the spring house.

And this is a very sad story. He went down there. He ran down to the spring house. See, what's going on? And he looked into the door. And do you know what he saw? It was a horrible sight. He saw his wife hanging from a rope from a beam in the spring house. He took his jackknife and quickly cut the cord, and she fell off. And he saved his wife. And here what was happening is that she was just about to have the baby, and she was scared. And somehow or another, the devil had convinced her that she's not going to make it anyway. And so she thought she's not even going to go through all that pain of this childbirth, and so she's just going to get rid of herself before that even happens.

And so here my great-grandpa was there, and so he saved her. And out of that, three days later, my grandfather was born. And they called him Meno. Meno Hoover. And that was the only boy they ever had that survived. And out of that family came an ocean of people that kept the family name. And my grandfather, when he died, he had around 300 descendants at the time he died. He was also late in the '90s when he died. And now there are—I don't know how many of the family that's left. And they're all my grandpa's descendants from down through that area. So that's what happened. Later on, my family that was working in that area, Meno Hoover, grew up, and he was converted at a Mennonite church sometime with some conference Mennonite folk.

But then somewhere along the line, he was going to be—somebody—they were looking for an ordination. And he was the only one that's candidate to do it. And everybody expected that Meno Hoover, a young man, is going to be the new preacher there at this place. And everybody sort of accepted, "Well, it's how it is. Well, it's fine." The bishop thought so too. A couple of bishops came in. One came from further north, which is the Waterloo area, which would be up in the Kitchen area. One of the bishops came from down there, Ezra Martin. And the other one was down there at Freeman Rittenhouse. And he came from out there close to Hamilton, Ontario, close to Niagara Falls, actually.

And so he came over there, and these bishops were coming over. And all of a sudden, my grandfather, Meno Hoover, whom I worked with so much—he had, as an older man, he worked in a pallet shop, and I was the boy that there was—as soon as I was out of school, I was there helping at the pallet shop and so on. And he told me stories all the way through. He was a great storyteller. And I don't remember much about the pallet shop, but I do remember very much about the stories. Well, anyway, one of the things that he liked to talk about, he said he was coming down from the upstairs of the barn right before this ordination.

And everybody expected Meno was going to be the ordained man. He was halfway down the stairs. All of a sudden, the Lord told him, "Don't have a thing to do with this. What's that all about?" Well, he was completely mystified.

But he told the people later on, he said, "I can't go along with this. I don't know what's happening. But I'm not supposed to be going there." So anyway, he didn't. And everything changed. All the people at that area, that whole church, died rather promptly, and everything went cockeyed, and they had all manner of problems, and he was out of it. And even though he lived on a very beautiful farm, it's the old Hoover farm right beside the lake and so on. And here he took that, and he went somewhere else and started somewhere else. And if it wouldn't have been that for that decision of my grandfather, have you any clue where I would be?

You wouldn't have a clue. Do you realize most of our relatives, when we go to the last reunion, it was about 10 years ago, the family reunion, most of the people have not even a clue as to what anabaptism is or anything of this nature. And they are from all over the place. And of course, they're divorced, remarried, they're Catholics. They're all manner of stuff. And here they always ask me about some historical things about our background. Well, whatever all that means, it doesn't mean much to me. But the fact of the matter is, our family was completely, utterly changed. The reason I'm telling you these stories is I'm talking my story. You have your story, and you are going to have your story by the time you're done.

So that's what the whole thing's all about. So anyway, my grandpa went to another place and so on. My dad was exactly that same kind of a person. One day, he was going to go down to a congregation that, at that moment in time, was functioning at a place called Muddy Pond, Tennessee. And have you ever heard of that place? It's a curious place. There's a lot of very zealous people there, and they had all sorts of ideas. I had two uncles living down in there. And here they called on my dad. My dad was a church leader in the family or in the church fellowship. Nothing's getting caught. I don't know where it is.

So whatever the case, the thing was, they wanted my dad to come down there. And so here my dad and my uncle Daniel Martin, and there was another man called John Shirk, and who is now the bishop up there at Gory, Ontario, amongst the Orthodox Mennonites. But he's an old man by now. But anyway, this is in 1970. Summer of 1970. Dad was out in the barn. He walked into the horse stall, because of course we had horses and buggies and so on. Interesting enough, because we were like a million miles from the rest of our relatives, as far as culturally. But whatever the case, so we were there, and my dad was out there halfway through putting the harness onto the horse.

Gow chat. And so he was there. The Lord spoke to him. Said, "You take your son Peter along." What's that? That's unreasonable. You don't take three preachers and go down to Muddy Pond, Tennessee, and try to fix a church problem and bring a 10-year-old boy along? I mean, what's that all about? And so my dad was so doubtful about it that he actually gave the Lord a test. He said, "All right then, Lord. I will take Peter along," which is me. And he said, "I will take him along, providing I'm going to find him on the yard where he is." And the weird part of it is, I was away for holidays. It was during the summer, and I was with my twin friends, and we were like about, oh, I don't know, 12, 13, 14, 15 km.

It's probably like close to 20 km away. It was on the other side of St. Jacob's, Ontario. And so here we were. And here I was going to be gone for a week. And my dad had to drive all the way down there to pick me up and see if he could take me down to Tennessee. Well, the last thing I was going to be doing that. Well, all right.

While that happened, he was there out putting on the harness on the horse. And at the same time, I was down there, down east of Conestoga, Ontario. And here there's two boys that were I was taking along with some twin boys at their house, is where I was staying. And that morning, we had all decided, "All right, well, we're going to go, and we will visit another boy, which is about, oh, I don't know, a couple of kilometers east of our place, also close to the town of Conestoga." And this was a brewmaker farm, and it was right past Josh Baumann's. Josh Baumann's later on lived in Muddy Pond, Tennessee. If you know anything about those folks.

But whatever the case, so we were going down that road, and it was in the summertime, and it was actually through the bush lane. And we were going down there, and it was hot already in the morning, sort of. It was during the summer.

And we were all walking barefoot, of course, we were little boys. And so all of a sudden, we were halfway down there, and we were out in the bush lane. And here, all of a sudden, I had this thing happening.

Somebody told me, somehow, I was 10 years old at the time, and he said, "Stop. Don't go down there. Turn around." Well, I was mystified. How in the world? What's this all about? And so I told the other boys. I said, "Oh, let's stop then. Let's go back home. Let's not go there after all." They said, "Well, what's wrong? Do you feel sick?" I said, "No, I don't feel sick." I said, "What's going on?" And they said, "Well, my feet are wet, and my pants are getting wet." And they said, "Well, that's silly." I said, "We go swimming all the time. We get wet all the time. And you're barefoot. What's the difference?" And I said, "Well, I don't know, but let's just go back."

And so we turned around, and we walked back to where these folks came from. And I was on the yard, barely on that yard. Then here comes my dad with his horse and his buggy, and he comes in there with a big smile. And there am I standing on the yard, exactly the test that he had given to the Lord. And so here my dad immediately said, "You go get your clothes immediately, and wash up your plates a little bit. We're going to Tennessee right now." And this was the first time I was ever going to the USA. And we got over across to Detroit or whatever, and we went down there. Well, anyway, the only reason I'm telling you these stories is: Be ready when it comes.

However it comes. Listen. There is a world of a difference. Whether you are a person that grabs a Bible and takes it as a book, and all that you do is like a rulebook, like there's do, do, do, and don't, don't, don't. If that's all you're doing, you are using your Bible in abuse.

You're actually using something that is never going to work for you. You may actually wreck what you learn from the Bible. So the thing, the moral of the story, what I'm telling you as young people is, the thing is: Get tuned in. Listen. Learn how to listen. The Lord will tell you. And I'm not saying it's all going to come miraculously and strangely and unusually. But the thing is, you need to be tuned in. That is the main thing, probably, I want to tell you tonight. But that has much to do with the kingdom, the secret of the kingdom of God. But there's much more about it. OK, now we want to read a few of the Scriptures that go along with it.

So now we have the kingdom of God is here. And so let me just see. Did you read the Scripture? So read the Scripture right here. Nicodemus said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one can perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God is not with him." In reply, Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." "How can a man be born again when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born."

Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to Spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." All right. The Spirit is what you need.

You need it. Otherwise, you are stumbling around. You are falling and wherever in the dark. If you will find the light, the way to go, you will need to find the Spirit somehow. And it's there for you. Don't ever think it's not for you. It is for you.

For you in person. Don't wait. Don't stay until or give up on it. Just stay there. Hang on. And the Lord will show you how to go. And I will tell you another little description, a little bit how it all goes. There are two ways of kind of working it out with our understanding of God and the Scriptures and the truth and eternity and everything. One of them is in German. We have two terms for it. One is called the Gehusumsglauben, which is the kind of obedience that comes from obedience. Gehusumsglauben. And that thing is always the thing about rules and how you do this, do this, don't that, don't that, and so on. Well, we are only way too familiar with that kind of stuff amongst anabaptist folk.

And many of the people here are of anabaptist background. So if all that you can think about, doing all the right things, do you know what? You probably haven't even caught it. Now, the other side of it, and many times it's the other ditch of the whole situation, is a thing called a Herzensglauben, which is like the kind of a faith, the kind of an understanding that is totally wrapped around, totally geared on experience. The Herzensglauben, like the experience of the heart and so on. Well, if that's all that you've got, and all you have is just, "Oh, this wonderful thing happened like five years ago at July or whatever." Well, whatever. Well, if that's all you can talk about, it's just how it went when you got born again.

You're also not catching it. There are two things. We need to be both obedient. We also need to have an experience, but we have to walk with the Lord. It's a bit like walking on the railroads. I don't know if you ever tried doing railroads. But if you ever walk on the railroad, you're not going to be looking at your feet and think you're going to stay on the rails. If you're talking on top of the rails, walking on top of the rails, you have to be looking far ahead. You have to have a vision. You have to walk forwards. And then you can walk on the railroad quite successfully. Well, that is a bit how it is with being a Christian.

You have to not fall into this ditch, into that ditch. You have to keep walking, walking, walking with your eyes fixed on Jesus. That's how it works. And out of that, your spirit and your life, everything will come together. Now, I will have to tell you another sad story, a very, very sad story. Just some while ago, there was an anabaptist man that I don't even know personally. So it's probably good. But I do know his brother-in-law, and I know other people quite well. And this man, apparently, from what they're telling me, is for about a year and a half.

This man in a conservative Mennonite congregation. And he was, of course, wearing his plain coat and wearing all the good stuff and the right kind of shirt and whatever and so forth. But whatever. And anyway, he was a Sunday school teacher.

Apparently, for the last year and a half, that man was visiting a lady, a prostitute, night after night or many times. Just night after night after night. And then he went to the Mennonite congregation and was able to stand up on a Sunday morning and teach Sunday school. And then he was able to pray and so on and so forth and be just as religious as he can be. After all this came into the clear and was discovered and so on, his brother-in-law asked him, "How in the world could you do that?

How could you do that and at the same time preach and pretend that you're all the same?" And then he said something that was very profound. It's probably the most profound thing he ever said. He said, "The two things were just not connected."

Well, do you know what? That was the problem.

He identified correctly. They wasn't connected. Is your life connected? Is my question to you. Is it connected in my life? That is the issue. Our life, our belief, our current direction, is it all the same thing? Or is it just a couple of things, bits and pieces here, and we have side by side, and we all sort of have ideas how to work it? Well, it's not going to work.

When I was up in Canada, I was teaching school, and this was back in the 1970s. And of course, I had a good number of First Nations children. Well, a number of these First Nations folk had joined our church. And this was some kind of a Mennonite congregation up close to the Ottawa Valley. It was up in the northeastern part of Ontario. Actually, in fact, I don't know if somebody heard from there or not. But it is now a church that they call themselves Fort Stewart. I think they changed it somewhat, but it's at Fort Stewart, Ontario.

Anyway, whatever the case, up in there, there was a First Nation guy, which was from the Ojibwa tribe, and he had gotten converted. It was part of the church. His name was Dallas Johnson. And he was a very earnest and an interesting person to know. And whatever the case, but he fell back, very sadly. And one night, while Dallas Johnson was down at the Curve Lake Industry, at the we say Indian Reserves, we used to say, but we're not supposed to say it. We say now called First Nation tribes or whatever.

Everything is changing up there in Canada. But whatever the case, so we were supposed to OK, Dallas was down there, and he was in a pub. And in the pub, sadly, he went up front, and he was getting lots of things to drink. And somehow or another, he had gotten too much, and he choked and whatever, and he fell over, and he choked himself, actually, and died. It was a horrible, horrible ending. But then we, of all things, were called on to come down there and have the funeral. And so we went down there, and I was a school teacher, of course, at that time. And we were down there. It was like 30 below zero.

And don't worry if it's going to be Canadian or American, because it's about the same on both sides. And so it was if it would have been 30 below, it would have been here. It would have been there as well. And so anyway, it was 30 below down over there, over up there. And we went down there, and it was brilliantly sunny. It was the middle of the summer, and there was lots and lots of snow. And I was really, really surprised that the First Nation folks had actually dug a grave. But here they did. And so here we were, and we were trying to get him buried. And somewhere along the line, they said his favorite song was um how does it go?

Do you have the song right there, don't you? I have it right here. Um Where do I find it? You read it now. Read it? How does it say? You just want to read it? Oh, "Ere You Left Your Room This Morning." We'll see if you can sing that song. Do you know that song? I think you do. You do know it? OK. Well, anyway, that was his favorite song. And so now they asked us if we can sing that song at the funeral. And my oh me, we said, "What are we going to do with this?" Because it just doesn't sound like it fits like what we were doing. And here we're trying to bury this person.

And here on the top of it, like all these First Nation people that came, I would say 95% of them, of these men that were there, were either quite drunk or halfways drunk. And here they were, and it was just a weird, weird situation. But we sang this song nevertheless, and we tried to do as best as we could with the funeral. It was quite a strange funeral. But here is the song. So let's see if we can stand this song, stand and sing this song, because I want you to be thinking about that particular song. And you better start it, because you know the song, don't you? I'm not sure if I know your tune to it, though. "Ere You Left Your Room This Morning, did you think to pray in the name of Christ our Savior?

Did you sue for loving favor, if a shield to bathe? Oh, I'll pray in rust and weary. Prayer will change the night today.

Soul in sorrow and in gladness, don't forget to pray." If anything that you should remember, don't forget to pray. Don't forget to pray. And now you may sit down again, if you want to. But the thing about prayer is, don't even worry about making long, elaborate prayers.

Actually, very recently, I had a very strange vision. And I don't know if you like having visions or what. I was never quite sure about as to what all comes. But every once in a while, I just have them, whether I'm either sleeping or whether I'm awake. Many times, it was right before I go to sleep or whatever. And all of a sudden, I see stuff. And this particular time, it was a very weird one. It was I was there, and all of a sudden, I was on the other end of the prayers.

It was really weird. I was there with the Lord right beside me. And here, these prayers were coming from all over the place, from all over the world. And here, there was people came up, and they shared their prayers. And I was absolutely flabbergasted just listening to them. They were weird prayers. Do you know what they were? And people came in there, and they started talking to this direction, because I was on the other end of the prayers. And so here, these things came, and they were like long, worded little things. And they had like, "Lord, this and Lord that, Lord the other." And it's kind of a sing-song little thing. And it says, "Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well."

And here it's going on and on. And here, and on top of that, it was all clichés, like old things that everybody always says all the time when they're praying. Anyway, and a lot of it was sort of King James halfway through. And here it was. And so here I was listening to all of this kind of stuff, and it was so bizarre. And I thought, "And Jesus has to be there listening to all that kind of stuff?" And I thought, "Well, I feel sorry for him." And I thought, "Well, do you know what we should do? We should try that on one another and see how it actually sounds. I mean, you try it with your dad and see how he's going to look at you.

I mean, you'll get some very strange looks if you start talking to people like you. Why on earth would we talk like that when we're praying? Why don't we just pray like we pray and try to say what we want to say? And on top of that, we don't have to make a long spiel about what we're praying about. I mean, we can just pray, and we can say these kind of things, and then we can move on. And as far as prayer goes, if we're talking about prayer tonight, and my feeling about prayer is, actually, recently, a friend of mine, he was talking with his brother. So it's not exactly directed to me, but he was talking with another brother in the church.

And it was over in England. It was actually in northern England. And the man, I don't know if you ever heard of him, but it's Tom Wright. If you know who Tom Wright is, he wrote a number of books, and he was on little YouTubes and whatever about things. He's actually an inside kind of a person. But anyway, he was talking with his friend. And this friend, he asked him, "So how did it go with your prayers this morning?" And he said, "Oh, well, I prayed about five minutes." I said, "Well, that's strange. So five minutes?" And he said, "Well, I was trying to pray for over half an hour, but it finally started working when it was about like when it was done.

And so I had about five minutes left." And do you know what? That is very honest. Very honest. While we are praying, we may as well be honest. Do you know what? Most of you people, certainly me, and most all of us around, we can't just sit there and just spout things, just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk while we're praying. It's not even necessary. The Lord already knows a lot of these kind of things anyway. But one thing we do need to do is we need to be in the presence of the Lord. And even in the presence of the Lord, maybe it's not even going to be five minutes. In fact, if you are serious about it, I would say you push it.

When you're young and you're starting all of this with your prayers, you will be good off if you actually, in a complete minute, are in the presence of the Lord in your heart. Try it. Just try it. For a whole minute, you're not thinking of anything other than just the Lord.

As a school teacher, I sometimes would talk with my children, and I said, "All right, so now we are going to be just totally quiet now for a whole minute. But there's only one thing I'm going to tell you. While we are on this whole minute of being totally quiet, just the only thing I'm going to ask you is, don't think of any pink alligators."