She related the experience to some older members of her church, and they told her to take the messages seriously. "I didn't know where Salt Lake was. I had never been very far from home. When I asked the bus company what the fare was, it turned out to be a fortune, so I knew it was a long way away."

That was in 1959. Two years later, after a great deal of prayer and inner struggle, she and her four children, Debra, 7, Ernest, 8, Rozie, 11, and Pam, 12, set off for Salt Lake City, 1,700 miles away. Some friends drove her to St. Louis. Once there, she didn't have the fare to Utah and only had enough to take her family to Kansas City, Mo.

Once there, she and her children walked to Kansas City, Kan., got a ride to Topeka, then another ride to Junction City. "I told my children we weren't going to hitchhike. We'd just walk and if someone befriended us, that was God's will. I prayed all the time that he would help us, and he did."

People helped her and her children in Topeka and gave them a vacant mobile home to stay in and some groceries and a small amount of money. She told her story to the pastor of a Pentecostal Church in Topeka and he asked her to preach and put a story about her in the local newspaper. Hundreds of people from all over Kansas came to hear her.

The church gave her and her children a train ticket to Salt Lake City, and on the way she stopped in Denver a week to preach. "I made friends almost immediately. God opened ways for me."

Finally arriving in Utah after weeks of hardship and discomfort - but filled with joy at the help she had received from strangers along the way - The Rev. Cosby stopped first in Ogden, found work as a cleaning woman, saved her money and later moved into a small basement apartment in Salt Lake City, where she started holding church services.

"I couldn't get a job. I scrubbed floors and did whatever work I could, but it wasn't steady. I didn't want to take welfare, but my daughter Rozie, who was 11 then, was critically ill. I had tried to keep her at home and care for her, praying for her recovery, but people found out she was sick and the police came and made me put her in a hospital.

"She recovered in a short time and while the doctors had diagnosed her disease as rheumatic fever, they admitted later they could find no laboratory evidence she had ever had it. I believe she was cured by prayer."

The Rev. Cosby said those days were a great struggle for her to keep her family together. She knocked on doors as a missionary and soon had dozens of people calling on her. She continued to hold church services in the living room of her basement apartment.