116 I The Breeze of the Spirit

one to ask a question like that! Before you preach this morning, Sam, I suggest you stop and think about the consequences. It should spice your sermon.”

“Good. I’ll do just that,” Sam agreed. “What’s more, one day I’ll write it all down. Now before we ring off promise me two things—first, keep in touch with us and, most important, make sure that this time you do catch that Chicago plane!”

As he hung up, Yager had a broad grin on his face. He was going home, but Chicago would be different.

On his return home the Chicago lawyer began to put his faith to work—I might say that he “burst into song.” As he wrote me shortly, he could see God’s Holy Spirit “stab down and cut like a gleaming knife into the jungles of contested litigation, tumble walls of legal technicalities, and ease the demands of cross- examination.”

As a man of faith and a romantic, Yager Cantwell had been viewing such events for a long time, but only in a two-dimensional way. He had been a trial lawyer for seven years before he met Sam Shoemaker. After his trip to New York he continued to abide by the rights, standards, rules, and precedents of the American Bar Association, but he seemed to be viewing his professional activities with a fresh, three-dimensional, spiritual appreciation. A quotation from another of these early letters sounded equally lyrical: “The Holy Spirit enters the lives of clients, witnesses, opposing litigants, and at times mellows the most antagonistic and obstreperous lawyers—including myselfi”

In the editorial office of The Evangel we were impressed by what was happening in Yager Cantwell’s law practice; his awareness that something new was being added, and that this freshness came to him as a direct result of his own developing spiritual experience.

The whole Evangel family (a network of like-minded readers around the globe) was keen about any reports of the effect of personal evangelism on social conditions, and we were printing too few stories of the results of conversion. Christians with the strongest personal faith so often failed to relate such experience to the situations where they spent most of their waking hours—the office, the factory, or the home. Many were self-conscious and needed prodding to apply the radical truths of the New Testament in places where they might run into opposition or be thought