15. Beaten Low by the Storms
Beaten Low by the Storms
The seed-vessel hopes for nothing again. It seeks only the opportunity of shedding itself; its purpose is fulfilled when the wind shakes forth the last seed, and the flower-stalk is beaten low by the autumn storms. It not only spends but is “spent out” at last.
AS THE FIRST MISSIONARY IN ALGIERS, Lilias Trotter was often staggered by the immensity of the task of carrying the gospel across those desert wastes to the countless little villages hidden among the sandhills. After seven years she went to England, so exhausted she felt that she needed “weeks for prayer, but at present I don’t seem to have sense for concentration in prayer or anything else, and am just vegetating, and writing up this journal, and drawing the pictures from very promiscuous notes in tiny notebooks, written and drawn on camel-back, or in stray moments while supper was cooking, or the beasts were lading.”
The doctor said her nerves and heart were worn by the strain of the battle and by the climate. During one sirocco (a hot, oppressive, dust-laden wind from the Libyan desert) she recorded a temperature in the shade of one hundred sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. Added to these physical buffetings was the sense of evil and spiritual oppression. Many who have challenged the forces of darkness in places where gospel light has not shone for centuries testify to the reality of the opposition and the nearly tangible power it can have over them.
At a place called Morley Hall in England she wrote of “a lovely sense of what it meant to be ‘buried with Christ’—not only ‘dead’ but ‘buried,’ put to silence in the grave; the ‘I can’t’ and the ‘I can,’ put to silence side by side in the stillness of ‘a grave beside Him’ with God’s seal on the stone, and His watch set that nothing but the risen life of Jesus may come forth.” It being autumn she watched the acorns falling on the road outside her lodging and thought how they would never come to anything because they were only lying on the ground, not in it. She made a fresh commitment to die with Christ, to be a corn of wheat that falls into the ground.
Blow after blow fell when she returned to her mission work. Two girl-brides, fifteen and seventeen, who had become Christians, died by a slow-working poison undoubtedly administered by enemies of the gospel. A girl convert who had been faithful for years fell under the power of a sorceress and suddenly would have nothing to do with the missionaries. Evil drugs were used to turn the minds of other converts against them. Although there seemed nothing encouraging on the human side of things, Miss Trotter turned as always to the parables of the earth around her.
“In the face of the bleak sky and cold wind, four little snowdrop buds have sat for the last two or three days with their chins on the earth, and now, today, one of them has reared itself up, pure and fearless on its stalk, with all the promise of spring.”
She knew the power of prayer that passes all bounds of physical possibility. Thinking of the “dear mud houses of Tolga, the domed roofs of the Souf, and the horseshoe arches of Tozeur, and the tiled huts buried in prickly pear hedges in the hills,” and her powerlessness to go to them (she and her colleagues had been forbidden to go to the South lands), she found an intensity of joy in praying for them, believing that she could through this medium more effectively “bring down the working of the Holy Ghost” than if she were allowed to go there in person. “One can shut the door, as it were, and stand alone with God, as one cannot on the spot with the thronging outward distractions of the visible.” She was strengthened by the thought of Moses’ unanswered prayer to enter the promised land. Centuries later he was allowed to stand on the mountain there with Jesus Himself. And Elijah, because he was denied his request to die, experienced the glory of the fiery chariot when it was God’s time for him to go.
Like the flower-stalk, she was “beaten low” by many storms, She hoped for nothing for herself but “to spend and be spent,” to measure her life by loss and not by gain, to be bread broken and wine poured forth.
Samuel Zwemer, another missionary to North Africa, wrote words which might describe Lilias Trotter’s life there: “To be content to persevere in Gospel witness for more than a generation, when visible results are so small, is heroism of the highest order, a heroism not of this world” (The Love that Was Stronger by I.R. Govan Stewart).
The seed must break in order to let go the shoot, the leafbud must break to let go the leaf, the flowerbud break to let go the flower, the petals drop off to let the fruit form. So in the wondrous cyclical plan of the Creator, the purpose of each is fulfilled. The Son of man forsook the ivory palaces of heaven to fulfill His Father’s plan: ‘You know how generous our Lord Jesus Christ has been: he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that through his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9).
He calls all of us to poverty—that total self-stripping which is detachment from all that this world has to offer. Some He calls to poverty in the narrower sense, doing without property or money. Money holds terrible power when it is loved. It can blind us, shackle us, fill us with anxiety and fear, torment our days and nights with misery, wear us out with chasing it. The Macedonian Christians, possessing little of it, accepted their lot with faith and trust. “Somehow, in most difficult circumstances, their overflowing joy and the fact of being down to their last penny themselves, produced a magnificent concern for other people” (2 Cor 8:2, JBP). They were living proof that it is not poverty or riches that determine generosity, and sometimes those who suffer the most financially are the ones most ready to share what they have. “They simply begged us to accept their gifts and so let them share the honour of supporting their brothers in Christ” (2 Cor 8:4, JBP).
We may be asked to accept poverty of another kind, something others are not aware of. Lilias Trotter had no impressive results to exhibit of her missionary labors as compared with thrilling tales coming from other lands in her time. She had accepted that poverty, “buried” with Christ, her grave sealed, as she said, that nothing but the risen life of the Lord Jesus should come forth.
A group of Sunday School leaders (of which my grandfather happened to be one, and my father, nine years old, was allowed to go along) visited her in 1907, asking to “see the work.”
“Our first feeling was one of dismay,” wrote Miss Trotter. “What could we show them in an hour? And again, what had we to show Americans with their big ideas and keen business minds—no hospitals, no schools, little organization, and no results to speak of for twenty years’ fight in Algiers. Then came the clue in the old saying, ‘Difficulty is the very atmosphere of miracle.’ We brought the problem to God, and bit by bit, as we prayed, the outline of a programme evolved. We decided to show in all honesty, not what we had done, but what had not been done, and believe in God to use the very weakness of it all.”
The day arrived, and the leader of the group reminded Miss Trotter that they had only an hour. They long outstayed the time as she showed them the maps she had arranged around her courtyard, “with their woefully thin firing line of stations, and the still sadder record given by tiny red flags of places visited once, and left again to their darkness; and photographs of the pathetic Christless faces of inland tribes and suchlike things.”
And the outcome? Before the ship carrying the Americans reached Naples they had raised enough money to support six missionaries for three years. The Algiers Mission Band was constituted and a committee was formed in America.
God used “the very weakness of it all.” The new commitment made at Morley Hall to be “buried with Christ” had prepared Miss Trotter for the tragedies she had to face when she returned to her field, but that was not the end of God’s story. Death was followed by resurrection, as for the flower stalk and the child of God it always is—in His time.