Saturday Nights

“Like as a father pitieth his children, So Jehovah pitieth them that fear him.” — Psalm 103:13 (ASV)

Mary Mitchell Slessor was born on 2 December 1848 in Gilcomston, on the edge of Aberdeen in Scotland. Her mother, also called Mary, was a gentle woman with a deep, quiet faith. Her Church had just started a mission far away, at a place in West Africa called Calabar, and she followed every report from it. The reports were read aloud at home and talked over. “I had my missionary enthusiasm for Calabar in particular from her,” Mary said long afterwards.

Her father, Robert, was a shoemaker who moved from job to job. And Robert Slessor drank. He lost his work, and in 1859 the family moved south to the factory city of Dundee, hoping he could make a fresh start where nobody knew him. The furniture was sold to pay for the move. It didn't help. Every penny he could lay his hands on went on drink.

So Mary's mother, who was not strong, went out to work in a factory. Mary, still a child, was sent with parcels to the pawnbroker. She ran there by the quietest back streets, so that her friends from church would not see her. Every Saturday night, after the younger children were in bed, mother and daughter sat sewing in silence, waiting for the sound of unsteady footsteps on the stair, and now and then praying to calm their hearts. When he came in, he would sometimes throw into the fire the supper they had gone without so that he could eat. Sometimes Mary was put out into the street, and wandered alone in the dark, crying.

The family hid all this. On Sunday, few families looked brighter in church. Mary rarely spoke of her father for the rest of her life. The memory made her shy and afraid of speaking in public. It also, her first biographer thought, made her a fierce defender of children and of anyone weak.

Yet Mary was not a gloomy child. She remembered herself as “a wild lassie.” Her faith began when an old widow in the tenements brought some girls in from the cold, pointed at her fire, and warned them that a worse fire waited for souls who would not turn to Christ. The picture kept Mary awake at night, and she “repented and believed.” Fear brought her to the door. But inside she found a kingdom of love, and she never tried to frighten anyone else into it.

Her father died in 1870, when she was twenty-one. Years later she wrote something she rarely said about her own life:

“I know what it is to pray long years and never get the answer. I had to pray for my father. But I know my heavenly Father so well that I can leave it with Him for the lower fatherhood.”

That is the honest heart of this chapter. She prayed for years, and her father did not change. She did not pretend he had. But she found another Father, the one in the psalm at the top of this page, who pities weakness instead of despising it.

Maybe your home has a secret your family works hard to hide: drinking, anger, money that never lasts the week. If so, hear this plainly. It is not your fault, and you are not the only one. Keeping it secret is not your job. If you are not safe at home, tell a safe adult: a teacher, a pastor, a relative, a doctor, or a helpline where you live. Mary's mother prayed, and she also kept her children going. Both matter.

One thing to do this week: write down one prayer you have prayed for a long time without seeing an answer. Under it, write Mary's words: “I can leave it with Him.” Then tell God honestly how that feels. If something at home is not safe, talk to one trusted adult this week.