OCTOBER 7TH, 1917
OCTOBER 7TH, 1917
[p. 72] MY DEAR —, — I was very glad indeed to receive your letter, and to know that you have definitely decided to give up your school work. I have felt for some time that you were attempting to do more than you had strength for, and I am thankful that you have recognised this. I think it is very likely that rest and change, and removal for the time from the region of those terrible raids, may restore you to a very considerable measure of strength. And thus you may be enabled to remain here for the comfort and help of saints, and find opportunity of service such as will fill up your time in a way according to the desire of your heart. You have certainly not been in a hurry to seek freedom from the yoke, and I am sure it is good to bear it until the Lord’s time comes to relieve us of it. J.B.S. often said that one’s peculiar calling was his training for spiritual service, but, if one is thoroughly broken in, the training has done its work and its effects remain after one is relieved of it.
I think I can enter into all your exercises perhaps rather more sympathetically than some, for I have had a fairly long drilling in the school of bodily weakness. It is trying to find oneself curbed and restrained on all hands, but I believe that if we accept the limitations which are imposed on us we get enlargements even in the way of openings for service in quite unexpected directions. I have prayed for you very often that you might be greatly succoured under the discipline you have had, and I trust that the gain of it may now become available for the good of many others through your liberation from your school duties. I am very glad that you are able to give up your work without any anxiety of the financial side, and I hope you will find the relief very beneficial to your health, as I believe it will be. I heartily appreciate your confidence and am truly interested in every detail of which you speak, and I shall continue, by the grace of the Lord, to pray for you that you may be directed by Him in all your way.
As to the exercises in —, one is thankful for the measure of quieting down as to public agitation, whatever may be the reason for it. Time is all in favour of the furtherance of divine exercise, and the more things are weighed, and prayed over, the clearer will saints become as to the matters in question ... In different ways the Lord is calling attention to the importance of the moral side, and saints are being helped to see what a spiritual reality Christianity is.
[p. 73] One is sorry for those who seem to be cloudy as to what is at issue, but the Lord will over-rule this to promote exercise, and will, I trust, make things clear to all, and especially to those whom we so truly love and whom we value so highly ... With very much love in the Lord,
Yours ever very affectionately,
October 7th, 1917.