What Followed

A young man, arrested for stealing S30,000, sat alone in a criminal's cell out of which daylight had faded. Lying on his hard bed, he pictured the world outside full of warmth, light, and comfort. The question came to him sharply, 

"How did I get here?"

Was it really for the stealing of this great sum?

Yes and no. Looking back twenty years, he saw himself as a schoolboy, ten years old. He remembered his Uncle John - such a queer, kind, forgetful man. That very morning his uncle had sent him to pay a bill at the country store and there were seventy-two cents left and Uncle John did not ask for it. When they met that noon, this boy stood there under the beautiful blue sky, and a great temptation came. He said to himself, "Shall I give it back, or shall I wait until he asks for it? If he never asks, that is his loss."

A theft of $30,000 brought this young man to a prison door, but as a boy, he began down that path when he sold his honesty for seventy-two cents. That night he sat disgraced, an open criminal, in his chilly cell. 

Uncle John was dead. His mother was brokenhearted. The prisoner knew that what brought him there was not the man's deed alone but the boy's. Had the ten-year-old boy been true to the Lord, life now would have been different. 

One little incident of cheating was the first of many, until his character had sunk low, he could bear no test, and he had wrecked his manliness and his life.

King Solomon writes: "Catch us the foxes, The little foxes that spoil the vines" (Song of Solomon 2:15).

Used with permission from

"The Beautiful Way"