Elizabeth Prentiss Quotes
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Home again, and full of the thousand cares that follow the summer and precede the winter. But let mothers and wives fret as they will, they enjoy these labours of love, and would feel lost without them. For what amount of leisure, ease, and comfort, would I exchange husband and children and this busy home?
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Some of His children must go into the furnace to testify that the Son of God is there with them.
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Our course heavenward is like the plan of the zealous pilgrim of old, who for every three steps forward, took one backward.
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And it gives me positive personal pain to see heirs of the eternal kingdom, made such by the ignominious death of their Lord, go shrinking and weeping to the full possession of their inheritance.
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I see that if I would be happy in God, I must give Him all. And there is a wicked reluctance to do that. I want Him--but I want to have my own way, too. I want to walk humbly and softly before Him and I want to go where I shall be admired and applauded. To whom shall I yield? To God? Or to myself?
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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 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.
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I want to see little children adorning every home, as flowers adorn every meadow and every way-side. I want to see them welcomed to the homes they enter, to see their parents grow less and less selfish and more and more loving, because they have come. I want to see God's precious gifts accepted, not frowned upon and refused.
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Go home and say 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!
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I am amazed at the patience of my blessed Master and Teacher, but how I love His school!
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It sweetens every bit of work to think that I am doing it in humble, far-off, yet real imitation of Jesus.
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People ask me how it happens that my children are all so promptly obedient and so happy. As if it chanced that some parents have such children or chanced that some have not! I am afraid it is only too true, as someone has remarked, that "this is the age of obedient parents!" What then will be the future of their children? How can they yield to God who have never been taught to yield to human authority? And how well fitted will they be to rule their own households who have never learned to rule themselves?
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Here is a little mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God, and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mothers heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, to her most tender cares, to her life-long prayers! Oh how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!
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Bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Take what I cannot give: my heart, body, thoughts, time, abilities, money, health, strength, nights, days, youth, age, and spend them in Thy service, 0 my crucified Master, Redeemer, God. Oh, let not these be mere words! Whom have I in heaven but Thee and there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee. My heart is athirst for God.
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Wondrous as it is, how simple is this mystery! To love Christ and to know that I love Him--this is all!
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The question is not whether you ever gave yourself to God, but whether you are His now.
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But there is no use in trying to engraft an opposite nature on one’s own. What I am, that I must be, except as God changes me into His own image. And everything brings me back to that, as my supreme desire. I see more and more that I must be myself what I want my children to be and that I cannot make myself over even for their sakes. This must be His work, and I wonder that it goes on so slowly, that all the disappointments, sorrows, sicknesses I have passed through have left me still selfish, still full of imperfections!
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Not till I was shut up to prayer and to the study of God's word by the loss of earthly joys sickness destroying the flavor of them all did I begin to penetrate the mystery that is learned under the cross. And wondrous as it is, how simple is this mystery! To love Christ, and to know that I love Him this is all.
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I am not sure that it is best for us, once safe and secure on the Rock of Ages, to ask ourselves too closely what this and that experience may signify. Is it not better to be thinking of the Rock, not of the feet that stand upon it?
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God does not give beforehand the grace with which to bear His blows; He does not heal before he smites. In your terror at the thought of parting with Horace, you left entirely out of account the sustaining power that would hold you up and bear you through those awful moments; you suffered in advance, and wholly in your own strength. But how many, how many persons I have heard say, ‘I am a marvel to myself! This blow, so long dreaded, has not slain me, as I ever believed it would; I stagger under it, but I live to wonder at the strength God gives me, and in which I bear it.
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And as to carrying religion into everything, how can one help it if one's religion is a vital part of one's self, not a cloak put on to go to church in and hang up out of the way against next Sunday?
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Sleep, baby, sleep. Thy father's watching the sheep. Thy mother's shaking the dreamland tree, and down drops a little dream for thee.
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Duty looks more repelling at a distance than when fairly faced and met.
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O happy life! life hid with Christ in God! So making me At home and by the wayside and abroad, Alone with Thee.
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...if God chooses quite another lot for you, you may be sure that He sees that you need something totally different from what you want.