Thank-you to Miller who passed along this story from Peter Marshall, the great Scottish preacher:
On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Peter Marshall preached to the regiment
of midshipmen in the Naval Academy at Annapolis. A strange feeling which he
couldn’t shake off led him to change his announced topic to an entirely
different homiletical theme based on James 4:14: For what is your life? It is
even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away. In
the chapel before him was the December graduating class, young men who in a few
days would receive their commissions and go on active duty. In that sermon
titled Go Down Death, Peter Marshall used this illustration.
In a home of which I know, a little boy—the only son—was ill with an
incurable disease. Month after month the mother had tenderly nursed him, read to
him, and played with him, hoping to keep him from realizing the dreadful
finality of the doctor’s diagnosis. But as the weeks went on and he grew no
better, the little fellow gradually began to understand that he would never be
like the other boys he saw playing outside his window and, small as he was, he
began to understand the meaning of the term death, and he, too, knew that
he was to die.
One day his mother had been reading to him the stirring tales of King Arthur
and his Knights of the Round Table: of Lancelot and Guinevere and Elaine, the
lily maid of Astolat, and of that last glorious battle in which so many fair
knights met their death.
As she closed the book, the boy sat silent for an instant as though deeply
stirred with the trumpet call of the old English tale, and then asked the
question that had been weighing on his childish heart: “Mother, what is it like
to die? Mother, does it hurt?” Quick tears sprang to her eyes and she fled to
the kitchen supposedly to tend to something on the stove. She knew it was a
question with deep significance. She knew it must be answered satisfactorily. So
she leaned for an instant against the kitchen cabinet, her knuckles pressed
white against the smooth surface, and breathed a hurried prayer that the Lord
would keep her from breaking down before the boy and would tell her how to
answer him.
And the Lord did tell her. Immediately she knew how to explain it to him.
“Kenneth,” she said as she returned to the next room, “you remember when you
were a tiny boy how you used to play so hard all day that when night came you
would be too tired even to undress, and you would tumble into mother’s bed and
fall asleep? That was not your bed…it was not where you belonged. And you stayed
there only a little while. In the morning, much to your surprise, you would wake
up and find yourself in your own bed in your own room. You were there because
someone had loved you and taken care of you. Your father had come—with big
strong arms—and carried you away. Kenneth, death is just like that. We just wake
up some morning to find ourselves in the other room—our own room where we
belong—because the Lord Jesus loved us.”
The lad’s shining, trusting face looking up into hers told her that the point
had gone home and that there would be no more fear … only love and trust in his
little heart as he went to meet the Father in Heaven.
After Peter Marshall had finished the service at Annapolis and as he and his
wife Catherine were driving back to Washington that afternoon, suddenly the
program on the car radio was interrupted. The announcer’s voice was grave:
“Ladies and Gentlemen. Stand by for an important announcement. This morning the
United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor was bombed…..”
Within a month many of the boys to whom Peter Marshall had just preached
would go down to hero’s graves in strange waters. Soon all of them would be
exposed to the risks and dangers of war, and Peter Marshall, under God’s
direction, that very morning had offered them the defining metaphor about the
reality of eternal life.
—Catherine Marshall, A Man Called Peter, pp. 230-231, 272-273
