Lester Andrews

Early in the 1920’s, I worked as a fireman railroad. I weighed around 235 pounds railroad and it was my job to feed the coal into the thundering furnace that powered the engine. I was firing on the Shasta Railroad between Portland and Roseburg, Oregon. On the last trip I worked between those two cities, I remember the engineer looking at me and saying, “There is something awful the matter with you.” I had been sick for a while, and by that time, I had lost about 100 pounds. All the way to Roseburg that day, pain was just tearing away in my body.
When I got off at Roseburg, I went up to my room, but I couldn’t sleep. Conviction was on my soul as I lay there thinking of how I had trampled underfoot my mother’s prayers, while I spent my life in riotous living. On the way home, every time that old engine would hit a curve, the sound seemed to say, “Here I go to Hell.” When I would reach up and ring the bell, it sounded like the old iron gates on the doors of Hell shutting behind me.

When I got back to Portland that day, I passed out on the engine in the railroad yard, and when I came to, somebody helped me get home. A few days later, the doctor told me I was dying with cancer of the stomach. He said, “There’s nothing more I can do for you. Go home and pick out your funeral songs. You aren’t going to make it.” It was a pretty blue day for me. I had a wife and four children, and I didn’t know what to do.

That afternoon I prayed, “O God, have mercy and save my soul.”

As I sat at home with my family that afternoon, some of God’s people came to visit me. They said, “Just look at you. You are sick and about to die without being saved. If you will seek the Lord with all your heart, He will heal your body and save your soul.” That was the sweetest story I had ever heard. I wondered if God would really do that for me after I had gone against Him as hard as I could for all those years. But God was merciful.

My old knees hit the floor, and I began to call on my mother’s God. That afternoon I prayed, “O God, have mercy and save my soul.” I repented of the sins I had committed as far back as I could remember. God answered my prayer and saved my soul. He put joy and peace into my heart. While I sat in the chair, someone read from James 5 in the Bible about how God heals the sick. They prayed for me, and God healed me right on the spot! A week later, I went back to work, because I wanted to tell the men in the roundhouse what God had done for me. I rode the engine down to Roseburg, and all the sounds I heard seemed to be praising God. When I would ring the bell, it was music to me; when the engineer would blow the whistle, it sounded like chimes. Before I could get off the engine, the engineer slipped off the other side and exclaimed to the other men, “He’s not dead! He has been singing like a songbird all the way down from Portland!”
Not long after God saved me, we moved to a farm between Portland and Dallas, Oregon. There, our baby boy became sick to the point of death, and the doctor told us he could not live. I had heard something about the Apostolic Faith Church in Dallas, Oregon, and God told me, “If you will ask those people to pray for your baby, I will heal him.”

That night I called up the Apostolic Faith people. They traveled through the dark and the rain over muddy roads and were at our home in about an hour and a half. They walked right in and said, “God will heal your baby.” They prayed, and God’s power came down into that room. They began to thank God for healing the baby, even before they got off their knees; and when they got up, the baby raised up and smiled.
That was real to my soul. I see reality in this wonderful Gospel. I see people’s prayers answered. They come to the altar of prayer and get saved, sanctified, and baptized with the Holy Ghost. I have peace, joy, and victory. Praise God for this salvation!

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After God healed him, Lester Andrews gave the remainder of his life—almost thirty years—to working for the Lord. On September 15, 1952, he went Home to be with his Savior.