Eugenia Price - The Burden is Light!: The Autobiography of a Transformed Pagan Who Took God at His Word

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THE BURDEN IS LIGHT!

BY

EUGENIA PRICE

Contents

To

The One Who Dared to Call His Burden Light!

By Ellen Riley

THERE STILL ARE SOME PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WHO BELIEVE the age of miracles is past. My observation is simply that these people have not met the author of this book. Her life has been one continuous miracle for almost five years and I have watched it. In August of 1949 she was a tired, bored, radio writer with no belief in God. Six weeks later she was a relaxed, radiant child of God! The miracle in her life started in my life three years before and this is the way it began.

One day in New York City I wandered into a great church which was always open. I had hit an impasse in my life. In the face of an overwhelming circumstance my Christianity had collapsed. I was seeking to know why my Christian life seemed to fall to pieces every time I had something difficult to face. I hoped to find my answer in the silence of that great church. People came and went and I stayed on. Still groping for an answer, I walked up the long center aisle to leave the church.

A little old man with white hair and a lighted face came up another aisle. He was leaving, too, and we neared the door together. Quite suddenly he said to me:

I beg your pardon. I am not in the habit of speaking to people I dont know but the Lord has told me to tell you something.

We both stopped and he had the merriest eyes I have ever seen.

I have a message for you, young lady. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you. Then he repeated it and told me again that he did not make a point of stopping strangers.

Outside I was completely unaware of New York. My mind was fastened to the little mans message because I knew God had sent me a direct personal answer!

The key was in the word first. It made me see the root of my trouble. I was seeking a victorious life first but I was running my life. The Lord had just said to me, Seek Me first. Let Me run your life.

This was completely clear to me that day but it was several months before I was ready to put Christ first. When I did so, with no reservations, everything took on another meaning. I was no longer in the world to beI was here to belong. That changed everything. I began to get a deep insight into the words of Jesus: If a man compel you to go a mile, go with him twain; He that saveth his life shall lose it; Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. I discovered that the ground is level at the foot of the Cross, and if we really follow Him we have to come along with the penitent thief who went with Him into Heaven.

This spiritual insight was the Lords gift and it prepared me to meet Genie Price. Eighteen years had passed since we rollicked through our teens together and I hadnt seen her in all that time. But when I did see her again it was the right time because I had begun to take Jesus Christ at His word.

For a few days in the summer of 1949 we were both in our home town of Charleston, West Virginiashe from Chicago and I from New York. When she called and asked me to be her house guest, I was glad to go. But, more than that, while we were talking on the telephone something seemed to say, This is important.

I remembered Genie as a pretty, happy-go-lucky girl who thought she owned the world. Standing beside me in her mothers living room that day was a tense woman who was still desperately trying to tell herself that she owned the world. I knew that she was tired to death of the telling but she didnt dare stop. Her face looked as though she were warding off a blow. She might have called it veneer. Magazine writers might have called it sophistication. But the expression in her eyes was one I can never describe, and I felt somehow that she was at the end of her rope. Still, I was sure she didnt know that at all. A sense of urgency and destiny hit me. Although I saw tragedy on her face, at the same time I saw the possibility of a tremendous miracle, too. I knew that I was standing before something which from the human standpoint seemed very unlikely. Yet she was there as she was, and He was there as He is, and I knew the Shepherd had already laid down His life for the sheep.

While she was showing me over the new house her parents had built, my mind was trying to adjust itself to all the thoughts whirling there. She told me afterward that I didnt seem to notice the beautiful house very much. I was trying to admire it but my heart kept asking, What could have happened to have made her this way?

*****

Genie will begin on the next page to tell in her own words what had happened before and what has happened since. My part in this book is simply to witness to this amazing transformation which He has allowed me to watch these last five years. Watching for me has meant the deep joy of a rare friendship, many tears, much laughter, and a closer look at the face of Jesus Christ.

I was born once and thirty-three years later I was born a second time . If this appears to be fantasy to you, read on and you will see that it is fact. And especially Reality.

This book is not being written because I was born the first time but because of the absolute fact of my second birth. It is after that in my life when things warrant writing a book.

*****

Five years after I was born the first time (in Charleston, West Virginia, on June 22, 1916) I began the first grade one year ahead of time because I.Q. tests had become popular. Then excited teachers told my mother that I should skip grades. And Mother, being very young and also president of the Parent Teachers Association at Elk School, said all right.

I skipped 2-B, 4-B, and 5-A.

And in several years at three universities I never learned how to do the things in arithmetic which I had skipped. I believe this is one of the ways I first learned the art of bluffing which art I continued to cultivate until my second birth in 1949.

During my childhood we had very nice homes in which to live. We were completely average in that the more money my father made at his dental practice, the bigger and nicer homes we built. Mother always told me not to boast about it, but I did. I shared the basic insecurity of every American born to moderate means in a rich country. Early I caught the foolish belief that the normal thing to do is to move ahead materially. And then move ahead again.