Another inspiring story from Lives of Early Methodist Preachers is one of the shortest in the book, but surely one of the most powerful. John Pritchard once suffered a great sickness that left him with nothing. In his own words, "My sickness continued so long as not to leave me a groat in this world, and hardly a morsel to eat. For three weeks I had to live upon twopence a day, and this at a time when just risen out of a fever."
But even in this sickness, he managed to find his way to a Methodist meeting where he heard a sermon that set him free. He described it simply: "My chains fell off at a stroke! My soul was free."
Twelve hundred miles on foot
Poverty didn't end when Pritchard found faith. Years later, he has become a preacher and was appointed to the Athlone Circuit in Ireland. His horse fell ill over the winter, but rather than let that stop his work, Pritchard did something amazing. He wrote, "Being poor... and the people poor also, I travelled the winter and spring quarters on foot, about twelve hundred miles."
1200 miles on foot in the winter! Isn’t that remarkable?
What poverty taught him to say
After years of illness, hardship and walking hundreds of miles in winter weather, Pritchard ends his account in this book with a question and an answer, both drawn straight from Scripture: "When were we hungry, and He fed us not? sick, and He came not to us? When went we without purse or scrip, lacked we anything really necessary? Can we not to this day say, 'Hitherto He hath helped us'?"
That last phrase comes from the prophet Samuel, who set up a stone called Ebenezer after the Lord had delivered Israel, saying, “thus far the LORD has helped us” (1 Samuel 7:12). Pritchard had walked far enough, through enough hardship, to know that this verse was a testimony.
You may not need to walk 1200 miles in winter for God, but it could be that you are going without something - money, comfort, security, a “horse that’s died” in whatever form that takes for you. John Pritchard reminds us: keep walking, keep serving, and let every mile become one more reason to say, at the end of it, "this far the Lord helped me!"
Meet John Pritchard, an early Methodist preacher who walked twelve hundred miles through an Irish winter rather than let poverty stop his ministry, and learned to see God’s help in all things. A moving true story on gratitude in hardship.