"Take Up and Read!"

One of the most famous conversion in the Catholic Church is that of St. Augustine.  After years of pleasure away from the Church St. Augustine experienced a conversion.  His dear mother, St. Monica,  had spent many years praying for her wayward son and shed many tears for him.  So many parents have taken encouragement from the patience and faithfulness of St. Monica and the beautiful gift of such a deep conversion in her son.  St. Augustine has not only been raised to a Saint within the Church but also named a Doctor of the Church.

St. Augustine recounts in the book Confessions the moment of his deep conversion.
I was ... weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which--coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, "Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it." Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon...
So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle's book [Paul's letter to the Romans] when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof."[Romans 13:13] I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.”

It has always struck me, that Our Lord would choose the voice of a child to call St. Augustine to Himself.  There is something particularly special about children, probably their innocence that allows Our Lord to work through them with such a powerful affect.  In reading these accounts in history of the role children have played in calling souls to Our Lord there is a hope that wells in the heart that these ever growing groups of children praying the Rosary will have a profound affect on many souls for the good.