We were sitting at the table in our Florida home and talking to our next-door neighbors. This young couple had helped us a lot in the past year and a half, after my stroke and my husband’s leg injury.
Unexpectedly, the husband began telling us the story of his troubled past. At 16 he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd in his hometown of Greenwood, South Carolina, and had spent a year in a reformatory. When he was released he’d had good intentions but, because of his record, he couldn’t find a job.
He became desperate and decided to rob a local service station so he could have enough money to leave the state. He stole his father’s car and gun and just before closing time, drove up to the service window of a gasoline station. He was about to demand all the money from the woman manager.
“But just then,” he explained, “I looked up and saw the sign overhead. It read, ‘God Is Our Security Guard—Always on the Job.’ And I knew I couldn’t rob that place. I then rushed home and prayed all night. I was determined to get my life straightened out. And with God’s help, I did.”
As he finished, I looked at my husband. Both of us remembered a night 13 years ago when I sat at our kitchen table in the same town of Greenwood, South Carolina, trying to make a sign for our business. I had scribbled down several words. Then finally it came, the slogan that my husband put on the sign that stood on the roof of the small service station that we managed:
“God Is Our Security Guard—Always on the Job.”
