Clarence Frost

If anyone has a right to praise God, I have. I was never taught to pray, and didn’t know anything about God. I began drinking with my father when just a little fellow. My poor mother pled with me never to drink alcohol, but I would become so drunk I could hardly sit on the wagon seat with my father. Tears would roll down my mother’s face as I would stagger into the kitchen where she was waiting.

My temper was so bad that, many times, my mother would have to stand between my older brother and me as I threatened to take his life. While still a young boy, I left that home and landed in the logging camps and mining camps where they put the liquor on the table just as we do the tea and coffee. I became a pathetic drunkard, and I lived that way until I reached the age of twenty-two.

They began to pray and ask God to save the bowling-alley man so he would give up the building for them.

That year, after working all summer in a camp in northern California, I went over into the Rogue River Valley in Oregon to spend the winter. I was very fond of bowling, so I rented a building in the city of Ashland and started a bowling alley in it. I was unaware of the fact that there was a group of Christians who had wanted to rent that building to use as a Gospel mission. They did not come to me and ask me to give up the building. They had a better way of getting it—they began to pray and ask God to save the bowling-alley man so he would give up the building for them.

Never have I had such a month as that! Terrible conviction seized me until one day I left the bowling alley and went to a store a block away and asked the man if he had a Bible. I had never owned one and did not know a line in the Bible. He said he had no Bibles but he had a red-letter New Testament. I did not know that was a part of the Bible, but I bought it because I saw pictures of Jesus and angels in it. Then I sat in the bowling alley and read that Testament while the boys tallied their own games. I went to the country for a few days and took the Testament with me, but when I returned home, I realized that I had left my Testament behind, so I found a Bible and bought it.

I heard the Voice of God speak out of Heaven to my soul and say, “You’d better pray.”

Mind you, people were holding cottage meetings and praying for me all this time—I later learned that they would sometimes pray until 2 o’clock in the morning! On the day that I bought the Bible, God sent two people to the home where I was staying. Not knowing I was the man they were praying for, they invited me to attend their meetings.

A desire compelled me to go to their meeting that very night. It was a cold night, December 12, 1911, when I made my way into a mission meeting for the first time in my life. I sat behind the stove in the back of the hall, broken-hearted and discouraged. I had a broken hand from a fight, and I had been drinking heavily.

During the meeting, I heard a man tell how he had been down in sin, but that he had prayed and God saved him. I had never heard anybody say they were saved. Right then, I lost sight of the world and everything around me. All I could think of was, Would God save me? Another man said that God would save the drunkard. That night, I saw myself as God saw me. When they asked sinners to come to the altar and pray, I heard the Voice of God speak out of Heaven to my soul and say, “You’d better pray.” I answered the Voice, “I can’t pray; I don’t know a line in the Bible; I don’t know how to pray.” God spoke to my heart a second time, “You’d better go.”

I trembled like a leaf, but stepped into the aisle and said, “I will go.” When I knelt at that altar, an old gray-haired man knelt in front of me and began to pray for me. He asked God to have mercy on me and help me to pray. I prayed like a child, and God rolled the load of sin off my heart. Within five minutes I was on my feet and I knew I was saved!

On my way home, I stopped at the bowling alley and told the boys I had just joined the church—I didn’t know what else to call it. Some of them thought I was crazy, but others took me by the hand and said, “Frosty, stay with it.”

God gave us a marvelous revival, and many of my old friends and schoolmates were born again in those meetings.

After that night, I never wanted another cigarette; I never took another drink of liquor; I never had another fight; the terrible temper was gone. God had set me free! The next meeting night, I went back to the mission and someone asked me, “Brother, what business are you in?” When I told them I was the bowling-alley man on Fourth Street, they began to weep and to praise God. That is when I learned that they had been praying for me. A few days later, I helped make seats for the new mission hall that had once been my bowling alley. I had the privilege of testifying in that same building. I told how God had saved me from the old life of sin. I told how I had even committed crimes against the government that would have put me behind prisons bars for years, but that I confessed them out after God saved me. God went before me, and I never had to serve time.

The following summer, I went back to the logging camp with the same old gang. They tried to tempt me into drinking, smoking, and carousing again, but God had cleaned up my life. During that same summer, on August 15, 1912, I was blessed to marry Katie Rice, in the city of Ashland.

Someone from the church gave me a copy of The Apostolic Faith paper. After reading that paper, I decided to go to their camp meeting in Portland, Oregon. That was in 1913. While there, I heard about the baptism of the Holy Ghost. I prayed and received that mighty experience. After that I answered God’s call to tell others of the wonderful change in my life and how they, too, could have the same experiences.

God gave me many opportunities. I went back to an old country church where I had once written in their Bible and left it there for the Christians to find. I stood in that same pulpit and read from that same Bible, which now had erasure marks on the pages to get rid of what I had written. I preached the wonderful Gospel of Jesus Christ to those people, and told them what God had done in my life. I asked them to forgive me for the way I had lived in that community. God gave us a marvelous revival, and many of my old friends and schoolmates were born again in those meetings.

I went to the dance halls, where I had staggered in and out for years, and helped clean them up so we could hold Gospel meetings in them. As a result of those meetings, we saw souls pray through to salvation.

I thank God for the prayers of His people.

The day finally arrived when I went back over the mountains to meet with my mother again and ask her to forgive me. I told her what God had done for me, and we pulled the chairs into the middle of the floor and had our first prayer meeting together. Oh, how I thank God for this wonderful Gospel!

While in that community, I saw a man working out in the fi eld. Years before, there had been much bitterness between us and we wouldn’t speak to one another, but that day I climbed over the fence and hiked across the fi eld to meet him. I wanted to shake hands with him and make things right with him. God is so good!

For thirty-four years I prayed for my father. I would request that other people pray for him also, and one day God answered those prayers. I thank Him from the bottom of my heart.

My wife and I reared our children in a Christian home. Many times when they were very young, I would see them bowing their heads at the table before they ate their meals. I would sometimes break down and cry and ask, “God, is it really me that You have made this change in?”

God kept me out of a life of sin and stood by me through all these years. He has healed this body of mine more than once. I thank God for the prayers of His people.