After All

I'd like to share this video from Princess Catherine.

I'm sure most of you have seen it elsewhere, but I wanted to keep it in a safe place and document it on my blog.

Remarkably,  I have come to a very similar realization that Catherine did, even tho we arrived there in almost completely different circumstances.  She being young with a young family. 

Me being isolated and pretty old.

I started feeling lost as to what my life was all about as I could not go anywhere or do anything and I was weak and feeling useless.  

I remembered a book I read (in the 90's), recommended by Elisabeth Elliot, called Stepping Heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss.

In this book you follow Katie, as she writes in her journal, from her school days to her final days when she is bedridden.  

The following is the final entry to her journal.

"I have no wish to choose. But I have come to the last page of my Journal, and living or dying, shall write in this volume no more. It closes upon a life of much childishness and great sinfulness, whose record makes me blush with shame but I no longer need to relieve my heart with seeking sympathy in its unconscious pages nor do I believe it well to go on analyzing it as I have done. I have had large experience of both joy and sorrow; I have the nakedness and the emptiness and I have seen the beauty and sweetness of life. What I say now, let me say to Jesus. What time and strength I used to spend in writing here, let me spend in praying for all men, for all sufferers who are out of the way, for all whom I love. And their name is Legion for I love everybody.

Yes I love everybody! That crowning joy has come to me at last. Christ is in my soul; He is mine; I am as conscious of it as that my husband and children are mine; and His Spirit flows from mine in the calm peace of a river whose banks are green with grass and glad with flowers. If I die it will be to leave a wearied and worn body, and a sinful soul to go joyfully to be with Christ, to weary and to sin no more. If I live, I shall find much blessed work to do for Him. So living or dying I shall be the Lord's.

But I wish, oh how earnestly, that whether I go or stay, I could inspire some lives with the joy that is now mine. For many years I have been rich in faith; rich in an unfaltering confidence that I was beloved of my God and Saviour. But something was wanting I was ever groping for a mysterious grace the want of which made me often sorrowful in the very midst of my most sacred joy, imperfect when I most longed for perfection. It was that personal love to Christ of which my precious mother so often spoke to me which she often urged me to seek upon my knees. If I had known then, as I know now what this priceless treasure could be to a sinful human soul, I would have sold all that I had to buy the field wherein it lay hidden. But not till I was shut up to prayer and to the study of Gods 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!

And when I entered upon the sacred yet oft-times homely duties of married life, if this love had been mine, how would that life have been transfigured! The petty faults of my husband under which I chafed would not have moved me; I should have welcomed Martha and her father to my home and made them happy there; I should have had no conflicts with my servants, shown no petulance to my children. For it would not have been I who spoke and acted but Christ who lived in me.

Alas! I have had less than seven years in which to atone for a sinful, wasted past and to live a new and a Christ-like life. If I am to have yet more, thanks be to Him who has given me the victory, that Life will be Love. Not the love that rests in the contemplation and adoration of its object; but the love that gladdens, sweetens, solaces other lives."

    O gifts of gifts!

Remembering Katie's conclusion 

helped men realize what I could do next....

And that would be loving God and loving others.

***

The following list came across my screen at the perfect time.

This.

And these are the things I contemplate as I come out of the woods...

pondering my purpose

after all.

Love you!

Donna