Pen’s Reviews > Nests Above the Abyss > Status Update

there is no hope of growth where there is no life.

it is Heaven’s interest that makes us talk if this place to you.

Come tell Me all that ye have said and done,
Your victories and failures, hopes and fears.
I know how hardly souls are wooed and won;
My choicest wreaths are always wet with tears.

His brilliant gifts, united to unfailing humility and a sympathy motherlike in its tenderness and thoughtfulness made him our refuge at all times of perplexity and need. To win a smile of approval from him was worth any extra effort. It is one thing to be praised by a person who has no experience of your work; it is quite different to win a “well done” from one who himself is a master in that very line.

There was no one else on earth who had such a complete knowledge of the details of our problems and so no one who could share so perfectly in our joys and sorrows. And he never disappointed us in that sharing. He was more than a superintendent to us: he was our missionary ideal; a continual rebuke, challenge, and stimulus to maintain at any cost the apostolic methods of missionary work.

It is always a peculiar joy to see God work all by Himself. He uses is to give us that pleasure, but He does not have to use us.

Dr Jowett has said, “The man who is sure and restful in the conscious companionship of his Lord has about him the strainlessness and inevitableness of the oceantide, and gives off bracing influence like God’s fresh and wondrous sea.”

Someone has said it is not fait to judge a thing while it is still in the making; wait until the product is finished, then we may pass judgment. And so we should never judge our lived and our trials, until God has completed in us what He is trying to do for us. When we see His finished product, we will be satisfied.