You know when you've been in the presence of someone great. Your soul feels larger just for having been with them. You think more grand thoughts. You stand a little taller. Your eyes are brighter.
Lilias Trotter is one such soul. Though dead since 1928, her life still speaks. The book is:
A Passion for the Impossible: The Life of Lilias Trotter
by Miriam Huffman Rockness. Lilias was an artist, and a pioneer missionary to Algeria. Her artistic insight, attention to detail, and spiritual application from the natural world are an inspiration to me. I've met a kindred spirit. I'll let her own words speak for themselves:
A bee comforted me very much this morning concerning the desultoriness that troubles me in our work. There seems so infinitely much to be done that nothing gets done thoroughly. If work were more concentrated as it must be in educational or medical missions there would be less of this- but we seem only to touch souls and leave them. And that was what the bee was doing, figuratively speaking. He was hovering among some blackberry sprays, just touching the flowers here and there in a very tentative way, yet all unconsciously, life-life-life was left behind at every touch, as the miracle-working pollen grains were transferred to the place where they could set the unseen spring working. We have only to see to it that we are surcharged, like the bees, with potential life. It is God and His eternity that will do the work- Yet He needs His wandering, desultory bees! (diary, 9 July 1907)
Just stumbled across your blog (I was googling Lilias Trotter). My mom is Miriam Huffman Rockness. She has a blog on Lilias; each week she posts a passage from Lilias's writing and a painting of Lilias's. She (my mom) then writes a reflection based on the passage that she posted. You might enjoy checking it out: www.ililiastrotter.wordpress.com So much of what Lilias wrote speaks to my soul, too! I know my mom will be thrilled to know there's yet one more person touched by Lilias!
ReplyDelete