<TITLE>13. Par 46-49</TITLE>L-46 I went overseas to Sweden. On my road back, I started my meeting up in Ohio, Cleveland, Ohio. That night they come to the meeting, setting way back, and was setting, praying. And while I was on the platform, the Holy Spirit turned me around to their faith, and said something, maybe not these words, but on this matter. "The lady, and the man, and the little boy setting back there, he's a contractor from Kentucky; and they have a little boy that's crippled by paralysis, that's got his legs drawed up. But THUS SAITH THE LORD, he's healed." They didn't know what to say. In a few moments they said, "David, raised up." And David was as normal as any other boy. Love projected.
He quit contracting, sold out, bought a little place next door to me, and is my neighbor. Mrs. Wood is sort of a veterinarian. She loves animals and outdoors, a very fine lady. And their people are Methodists, I think.

L-47 That morning I was teaching the boys on love. Now, closely, before closing... I looked coming down the road, and I seen a little object rolling and tumbling as it come down the road. And I looked, and it was about, I suppose, ten o'clock in day, boys. And what it was, it was a opossum. You know what opossums are up here. Now, anyone who knows wildlife knows that opossums travel at nighttime. They're blind in the day.
So here was this opossum traveling in the daytime. And he come down where there was no fences, two or three houses, coming from the woods, about five hundred yards across the highway. Here he come up the lane. And my house is fenced with a rock gate. And when the opossum got even with my house, he turned in. And I looked, and I said, "There's a opossum, and something has happened. It's perhaps got rabies. And look how it's acting, tumbling, rolling, fighting, trying to get in."

L-48 And Mr. Wood had been raking in the yard and had a yard rake laying there. And I said to the boys, "Come out here just a moment." And I run, got the rake, and threw it over the opossum. At that time the milkman come up, Mr. Gilmore. We were looking at the opossum, and I said, "It must have rabies. Oh," I said, "no, and look." Oh, excuse this, but maggots was all over its leg, fly-blows. The dogs had chewed it, or either it had been run over by a car and mashed to pieces.
"Oh," I said, "look how it's swollen up, that great big leg that big and its other one." I said, "It's--it's dying." And while I was holding the rake over the opossum, to my surprise... A opossum and a kangaroo is the only animals that pack their babies in a pocket. And her pocket let out, and she had nine little, tiny, naked babies. And I said, "Come here, boys. I will teach you some more of the Bible." I said, "Perhaps this opossum came in..."

L-49 The day before there had been a very fine, beautiful, young colored lady of our city that had had a illegitimate born baby, and had wrapped it up in a blanket, and smothered it to death, and taken it out in a taxicab on the river, and dropped it in the river.
And we were talking of that. So I said, "That lovely young lady wasn't nothing like the mother that this opossum is." Not because she was a colored girl, no; white girls, brown girls, yellow, they all do the same without Christ. But I said, "The morals of this opossum is better than the morals of that woman, for that woman didn't want her baby, and she took its life." The police had her in jail. But I said, "This old mother opossum hasn't got over thirty minutes to live." And she was a biting on the rake for all she could do.
Usually when you touch them they, what you call "play opossum," falls. But she was making her way somewhere. And I said, "She is biting this rake, and she's so frantic; but she's a real mother. She'll give this last thirty minutes of her life, fighting for her babies." I said, "That's mother love." She loved her babies.


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