I came across this book recommendation recently and I’ve found it delightful and helpful. “Stepping Heavenward” by E. Prentiss. (born 1818, died 1878).
"A fictional story of a young girl and the many challenges she confronts in her adult life."
These excerpts are some I found particularly encouraging.
“After alluding to my complaint that I still “saw men as trees walking,” he says:
“Yet he who first uttered this complaint had had his eyes opened by the Son of God, and so have you. Now He never leaves His work incomplete, and He will gradually lead you into clear and open vision, if you will allow Him to do it. I say gradually, because I believe this to be His usual method, while I do not deny that there are cases where light suddenly bursts in like a flood. To return to the blind man. When Jesus found that his cure was not complete, He put His hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up; and he was restored, and saw every man clearly. Now this must be done for you; and in order to have it done you must go to Christ Himself, not to one of His servants. Make your complaint, tell Him how obscure everything still looks to you, and beg Him to complete your cure. He may see fit to try your faith and patience by delaying this completion; but meanwhile you are safe in His presence, and while led by His hand, He will excuse the mistakes you make, and pity your falls. But you will imagine that it is best that He should at once enable you to see clearly. If it is, you may be sure He will do it. He never makes mistakes. But He often deals far differently with His disciples. He lets them grope their way in the dark until they fully learn how blind they are, how helpless, how absolutely in need of Him. What His methods will be with you I cannot foretell. But you may be sure that He never works in an arbitrary way. He has a reason for everything He does. You may not understand why He leads you now in this way and now in that, but you may, nay, you must believe that perfection is stamped on His every act.”
“I can’t be good two minutes at a time. I do everything I do not want to do, and do nothing I try and pray to do. Everybody plagues me and tempts me. And God does not answer any of my prayers, and I am just desperate.”
“Poor child!” he said, in a low voice, as if to himself. “Poor, heart-sick, tired child, that cannot see what I can see, that it’s Father’s loving arms are all about it!”
I stopped crying, to strain my ears to listen. He went on- “Katy, all that you say may be true. I daresay it is. But God loves you. He loves you!”
“He loves me,” I repeated to myself. “He loves me! Oh Dr. Cabot, if I could believe that, after all the promises I have broken, all the foolish, wrong things I have done, and shall always be doing, God perhaps still loves me!”
“You may be sure of it,” he said, solemnly. “I, his minister, bring the gospel to you today. Go home and say over and over to yourself, “I am a wayward, foolish child. But He loves me! I have disobeyed and grieved Him ten thousand times. But He loves me! I have lost faith in some of my dearest friends and am very desolate. But He loves me! I do not love Him, I am even angry with Him! But He loves me!””
I came away, and all the way home I fought this battle with myself, saying, “He loves me!” I knelt down to pray and all my wasted, childish, wicked life came and stared me in the face. I looked at it, and said with tears of joy, “But He loves me!” Never in my life did I feel so rested, so quieted, so sorrowful, and yet so satisfied.
(Several years pass with many heartaches before the next two excerpts.)
“But I see, too, that the great points of similarity in Christ’s disciples have always been the same. This is the testimony of all the good books, sermons, hymns, and memoirs I read- that God’s ways are infinitely perfect; that we are to love Him for what He is, and therefore equally as much when He afflicts us as when He prospers us; that there is no real happiness but in doing and suffering His will, and that this life is but a scene of probation, through which we pass to the real life above.”
This last one is when Katherine is visiting an old saint on her deathbed.
“Yes, I am tired,” she said, “but what of that? It is only a question of days now, and all my tired feelings will be over. Then I shall be as young and as fresh as ever, and shall have strength to praise and to love God as I cannot do now. But before I go, I want once more to tell you how good He is, how blessed it is to suffer with Him, how infinitely happy He has made me in the very hottest heat of the furnace. It will strengthen you in your trials to recall this my dying testimony. There is no wilderness so dreary but that His love can illuminate it; no desolation so desolate but that He can sweeten it. I know what I am saying. It is no delusion. I believe that the highest, purest happiness is known only to those who have learned Christ in sickrooms, in poverty, in racking suspense and anxiety, amid hardships, and at the open grave.”
Yes, the radiant face, worn by sickness and suffering, but radiant still, said in language yet more unspeakably impressive.
“To learn Christ, this is life!”
