It is at any rate a grand thing that, over and through all, each has kept on at her work and done yeoman service.”
“Dear L. E. S. turned the tide, gave me back the beginning of strength and life, physical and mental, and since then for the last 12 years I have stumbled steadily onwards,—gaining in strength and calm and hope,—till at length I can feel a wholesome life of my own—quite independent of the old pain,—with a very dear hand in mine, and with a grand life of work and struggle against disease before me.”
On the last night of that year she writes:
“‘Tarry thou the Lord’s leisure,’ ... ‘and He shall strengthen thy heart.’...
I believe profoundly in the ‘that He might be able to succour’. One does learn through pain what one never learns without,—and, hard as it is to feel it, I suppose one knows the ‘power of ministration’—the ‘Lo, I come’ is higher and more than even the personal happiness.
So—take and use Thy work.
What is the use of talking about presenting ourselves a ‘living sacrifice,’—and then moaning over pain,—wanting to ‘freeze on a warm night’!
Oh, dear!—one’s own littleness.
Well, God teach and guide us all.”
A few weeks later she comes to the end of the volume, and writes in a sunnier vein: