The Cotton Field and the Open Door

Mary McLeod was ten years old, picking cotton alongside her parents in Mayesville, South Carolina, in 1885. She could not read a single word. But something kept pulling at her — a restless ache she could not explain whenever she saw printed pages. Once, she picked up a book belonging to a white child and was told to put it down. The longing only deepened.

Then a Presbyterian missionary named Emma Wilson rode into the community and opened a one-room schoolhouse for Black children. Mary walked five miles each way to attend. On her first day, Miss Wilson placed a Bible in her hands, and Mary's fingers trembled over letters she was just beginning to sound out. "This child has something," Wilson told Mary's mother. "She has a calling."

Mary had not understood the ache. She only knew it would not leave her alone. It took Emma Wilson — her Eli — to name what God had been stirring in that young heart. Wilson arranged a scholarship, and Mary McLeod Bethune eventually founded the school that became Bethune-Cookman University, educating generations who might otherwise have been told to put the book down.

Young Samuel felt God's voice three times before Eli recognized what was happening and taught the boy how to respond. Sometimes the call of the Almighty comes as a persistent stirring we cannot quite name. We need someone further along in faith to say, "That restlessness — that is the Lord. Answer Him."