Emphasis Preaching Journal

In the first decade of this century, a woman in a small community came to see her pastor. She was in her sixties, and seemed greatly troubled. The pastor asked her to tell her story. She talked of an affair she had had with a worker on her father's farm when she was a teenager. The affair had resulted in a pregnancy, and she had had an abortion. (That would have been about the time of the Civil War.) She had come through this all right, and had later married someone else and had had a family. But she had never told anyone about her experience.