The Fifteen-Year-Old in the Snowstorm

On January 6, 1850, a fifteen-year-old boy named Charles Spurgeon trudged through a blizzard in Colchester, England. For months he had been restless with spiritual hunger, visiting church after church, reading theology beyond his years, desperate to hear something that would quiet the ache in his soul. He was hearing a voice he could not yet name. The snow forced him into a tiny Primitive Methodist chapel on Artillery Street, where barely a dozen people had gathered.…