When the Heavens Split Over Wales

In the autumn of 1904, a twenty-six-year-old Welsh coal miner named Evan Roberts could barely sleep. For thirteen years he had prayed the same desperate prayer: "Send the Spirit, Lord, for Jesus Christ's sake." Night after night in his small room in Loughor, he wrestled with God until the early hours, his pillow damp with tears, his heart aching with a longing he could hardly articulate.

Roberts was no theologian. He had spent his youth underground in the mines of Glamorgan, his hands blackened with coal dust, his lungs thick with it. But something burned in him that no darkness could extinguish. When he finally stood before a handful of people at Moriah Chapel that November, his message was staggeringly simple: "Bend us, O Lord."

Not fix us. Not improve us. Bend us — like clay yielding to the Potter's hands.

Within weeks, over one hundred thousand people across Wales had come to faith. Pubs emptied. Coal miners stopped cursing so completely that pit ponies, trained to respond to profanity, no longer understood their commands. The police had so little to do they formed gospel quartets.

Isaiah's ancient cry — "Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down!" — found its echo in that Welsh valley. Roberts understood what the prophet knew: revival never begins with God changing our circumstances. It begins with the Potter's hands pressing into willing clay, reshaping a people who have finally stopped resisting His touch.