Rev. A.J. Ogden

Nearly everyone in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, was poor to some extent back in the 1920s. It was a time when people really had to work hard to survive. My mother was no exception to that rule. She had to raise vegetables, hoe corn, raise a pig for meat, have chickens for eggs, and whatever she could find to earn a dime.

My birth was the second day of the New Year, 1926. Shortly after my birth mother would have to resume her necessary duties of trying to raise a crop for food, with the extra burden of caring for the new baby. It was almost an impossible task, to say the least.

But you and I know that a person, when put to the test, can usually do what one has to do some kind of way. As a tiny baby mother would put me in a card board box for a cradle and carried me to the field where she was working. She would place me in about the middle of the row she was hoeing, and if I cried too loud she would run to the box to see about me. I’m sure she worried about me all the time. It was I guess a fine plan if you could kind of forget about all the bugs flying around, perhaps bees to sting and snakes crawling everywhere. It was dangerous to say the least.

But there came a day when she heard me screaming for life, and ran to my box to find me completely covered with ants which stung me from head to foot. A doctor visit was one dollar at that point of time, but mother did not have a dollar. They say that for many days I lingered between life and death, but by God’s grace and with His help, I am here to tell about it. God was merciful to a little baby in a cardboard box.

I’m certainly not comparing myself to Moses, but we do remember he floated in a basket on the Nile River as a baby. But God saved him to be used of the Lord. God delivered that great deliverer of Israel. Listen to the words of Psalm 46:1, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.” I don’t remember the poet’s name, but he wrote the following words: “Should seven fold bolts of thunder roll, and shake this earth from pole to pole; no storm cloud shall shake my faith, for Jesus is my hiding place.”