Here’s a timely reminder for myself from my favorite Elizabeth Goudge novel; maybe it will encourage you as well. One of the book’s highlights is a set of simple prayers shared by an aged Anglican vicar to a young woman who struggled with a lifelong ailment that looks strikingly like bipolar disorder. She certainly had a mood disorder that caused devastating periods of not being able to function as usual that caused some of her family to think she was “mad.” This dear woman received life-sustaining words from the vicar and I have found them to be both a lifeline and a balm when I struggle myself.
“My dear, he said, love, your God, is a Trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these,
‘Lord, have mercy.
Thee I adore.
Into thy hands.’
Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these you will do well.”
Later the young woman, Mary, writes in her diary:
“I shall live and die here. Perhaps I shall never be well but this place will give me periods of respite that I would not have found in any other, and though I am able to do nothing else in this life, except only seek, my life seeming to others a vie manquee, yet it will not be so, because what I seek is the goodness of God that waters the dry places. And water overflows from one dry patch to another, and so you cannot be selfish in digging for it. I did not know any of this when I began this diary and I don’t know how I know it now. Perhaps it has something to do with the old man.”
“For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant.“
Job 14:7-9
The Scent of Water, Elizabeth Goudge
May we find periods of respite as we seek our eternal destination in this earthly journey. We all struggle with something.
Be You Very Well 