5. A Pair of Shoes and the Firs Conference
CHAPTER FIVE
A PAIR OF SHOES AND THE FIRS CONFERENCE
HERE, JULIA,” said Mrs. Tom Cole to her sister-in-law, Mrs. Otis Whipple. “The Firs Conference will soon open and you need a pair of shoes”—with a significant look at her—and she held out a five-dollar bill. I do not know if those were her exact words, but the gift was given for shoes and a significant look along with it, as Mrs. Cole told me herself years later.
Julia Whipple was not one to neglect her personal appearance. To be well groomed had been her life-long habit, but of late funds had not been too plentiful. The story of how Julia and Otis Whipple gave their last earthly possession to the Lord—this honeymoon cabin at The Firs, Bellingham, Washington—and of how God used it to establish the annual Lake Whatcom Bible and Missionary Conference which has been so blessed to themselves, has been told by Doris Coffin Aldrich in a book called The Firs of the Lord. Suffice it to say that 1923 was to be only their third attempt at a conference, and Julia Whipple was to be hostess. What would people think of her shabby shoes?
But she had something else on her mind.
She had been praying that Isobel Miller would come to The Firs Conference. She saw, as I had not, that here was one groping blindly toward God, and open to dangerous misleadings if she were not carefully grounded in the Word. As is a young person’s weakness, I might be carried off my feet by some magnetic personality of one of the many “isms,” if I chanced to meet such, at this stage. I needed grounding in the Scriptures and I needed Christian fellowship. I had a small college debt to pay and had been earning a salary for only six months—maybe money would be a factor in bringing me. At any rate, she waved the matter of new shoes aside, sat down, and wrote a letter urging me to come, saying that the enclosed five dollars, she felt, was the Lord’s provision for my boat tickets. Once I reached The Firs I was to be her guest—room and board would cost me nothing. Wouldn’t I come?
I received her gift and invitation quite casually, not at all moved with any desire to go. It was Mrs. Whipple’s kind heart, I told myself, and now I was forced to do something about it. But I felt my excuse would be an easy one to make. The conference came right in the middle of the summer school I had signed up for. I must get credit for this summer’s study, and they would hardly give me full credit for six weeks’ work if I ran off in the middle for ten or eleven days! So I made this my test, and I prayed about it: “Lord, if it be Thy will for me to go, please move the authorities to grant consent without reducing my credits, and I’ll take it as Thy will I am to go.”
The next morning found me before the registrar of the Teachers’ Summer Institute.
“I have been called to Bellingham on a matter important to me and would like to apply for ten days’ absence without reducing my credits. Could that be done, sir?” I asked.
He inquired my name, turned over the pages of a book, pursed his lips a moment, then said, “All right, Miss Miller. Just tell us when you leave and when you will return.”
I could not believe my ears. Only the day before a fellow student-teacher had applied for a week off and had been flatly refused! I still do not know how to explain it, but my full credits were given to me.
I came out of the office walking as if in a dream. I inquired about the boat schedule and sent word to Mrs. Whipple that I was coming, how and when, and went home to pack my suitcase.
So it came about that one evening in July, 1923, my boat arrived at the Bellingham pier. I had never been there before and knew no one, but as I looked eagerly around for Mrs. Whipple, a young man and a sweet-faced girl stepped up to me.
“Isobel Miller? We’ve come to meet you. Elden Whipple and Evelyn Watson—do you remember meeting us in Seattle? We have a car here. Hop in! We have to drive to the conference grounds, but it is not too far.”
Their warm friendliness made me feel at home immediately and soon we were whirling out over curving roads with fragrant woods on either hand. It was a twisting labyrinth to me, but finally we turned into a path, drew up among tall fir trees, and there was dear Mrs. Whipple coming to meet me. Her radiance, rippling laugh of joy, and overflowing hospitality was something to cuddle down into. I was duly hugged and kissed, then shown into a big firelit room. Older people sat on chairs, and the younger ones on the floor before the big, crackling open fireplace of logs. The flames threw a golden light over all faces, and the young people pulled me down on the floor to sit with them while the evening devotional service continued. Though always shy and reticent with strangers, here I was soon at home and filled with a wonderful content. The atmosphere was charged with the presence of the One whom I was learning to know and adore, and He was the center of everyone else’s attention too.
In the doorway I had been introduced to “my sister-in-law, Mrs. Edna Whipple Gish, whose story I told you in Seattle. She is to be your cabin mate.” Years afterward I asked Mrs. Whipple if this had been a premeditated arrangement, for it was to have a lasting effect on my life.
“I can’t remember that it was,” she said simply. “Edna’s was the only cabin with a spare space, as I remember it.”
After the campfire service Edna led me through a woodsy path to the little cabin in the woods where she and I were to live. We slept together, but before going to sleep she pulled out a little worn Bible from beneath her pillow and read a chapter with me, prayed, then at “lights out” we settled down with the perfume of the fir trees soothing us into slumber.
I had time to think back over Edna’s story just before falling asleep.
“This is Ellis’s Bible,” she had said to me as she reverently took the worn, much-marked book from beneath the pillow. Then I remembered what Mrs. Whipple had told me in Seattle.
Edna had met Ellis when he was on his first furlough, and found him her ideal. He was a young man of deep devotion and consecration, and together they had gone to China to the South Gate section of Nanking.
The next year they went for their vacation to beautiful Kuling, a famous mountain resort, where there is a pool and good swimming, also many lovely walks.
One morning they had decided on a swim—both were expert swimmers. As they left their tent they heard a cry from the pool. Ellis immediately ran and dived in to the rescue—a young missionary had caught a cramp and had gone down. Ellis was successful and saved her life, but he himself disappeared. Then Edna dived in to search for him. As time dragged on and she could not find him, one can imagine the terror and anguish of her feelings. Diving, searching, she did not notice that her body was being bruised and battered against the rocks. Ellis—that was all she thought of. Finally she saw his body washed up behind a little waterfall. Again she dived, reached him, dragged his body with her and got it to shore. But life had gone.
Exhausted, she sank on a tree stump and covered her face with her hands.
A few minutes later she happened to look up and saw some Chinese coolies standing terrified with the dead man before them. Quickly she approached them and explained that the body on the ground was not her husband—that he was safe with God—and she preached Christ to them.
Edna herself was so bruised that she was sent to the hospital and later advised to take a short furlough. Ellis’s insurance money was enough to bring her to The Firs for the summer, and the conference council had asked her to lead the young people’s meetings. We never knew what it was costing her to set aside her daily heartbreak and be our cheery, radiant Bible teacher. Years later Mrs. Whipple told me how Edna would go to the council and tell them she could not continue, but they would promise to pray for her, and back she would come to us.
She laid before us the Scriptural challenge to a consecrated life and to missionary service. I had never given the foreign field one thought up to that time. I was a stay-at-home body by disposition and a veritable slave to physical comforts. Travel never attracted me, for it meant strange faces and strange ways—in other words, discomfort. Edna was the first to show me that I ought to be willing to give this up, if God asked me to do so. When finally she gave a challenge to those who would surrender for foreign service, if He called, I put up my hand. I was surprised to see how thrilled she was. For to me it was a matter of course. That night I had made my bargain with God: I had promised Him my life. If He wanted it on the foreign field—why, of course, then I must go to the foreign field. It was not a question of if I wanted to go or not—I was no longer my own. At the time I had no clear indication that it was the foreign field He wanted. I was willing, if it were, to go—that was all. Why were they all so excited that I had raised my hand?
A much deeper blessing Edna had unwittingly brought me. Cabin life with her was my first encounter with a Spirit-filled life living in its daily routine habits. It was Edna off the platform who wrought most for me.
She sought the Lord’s face before that of anyone else at the beginning of each day. There was no wake-up chatter and pillow-flinging nonsense at dawn. This deeply bruised heart hungered and panted after the Lord, and her first waking thought was a longing for His fellowship and presence. And she kindled the same hunger in me. Remember, I had a bruised heart, too.
She read Philippians with me and Ellis’s marginal notes.
“This one thing I do“—how it smote home, because this precept was lived out before my eyes. I marked it in my Bible, too.
“Rejoice always“—Edna had attained to that. How could I ever learn the secret? I marked the verse, but decided to try for Philippians 4:11 as perhaps more within the possibility of attainment: “For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, there-with to be content.” This became my life-verse for the next ten years or so.
“That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death" (Phil. 3:10). Great words that moved me to the depths of my being—I was on that quest. But little did I know, beyond that mere fact, that my feet were on the High Way—I was searching for Him.