Among the Watering Places with Liz

I was so delighted to read this: Charlotte Bronte once saw Queen Victoria when they happened both to be in Brussels. The author was already well known by then but the Queen passed her unknowing. CB wrote of HRH as "A little, stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed - not much dignity or pretension about her" ( Queen Victoria , Lytton Strachey, 107). I have long been dismayed by my own figure and demeanor and found this observation about a real queen most heartening!

"When you devalue yourself, you become overly absorbed in and with yourself, and don't have anything left over to give others." (Encounters, Australian Evangel, April 1986) I found that clip in an old book and it gave me pause for thought: How often in a day do you think negatively about yourself? When I asked myself that, I was surprised with the answer!! My little friend (sort-of niece) Gill has very positive ways of dealing with life. She has been working on a 'Happiness Project' in which she spends a whole month thinking about an aspect of her life - such as gratefulness - then she focuses on cultivating this in a variety of ways. Another is money, not just her attitude to it, but going through her finances and reorganising. The last one she spoke of dealing with was confidence . What a great idea! It is the opposite of self-absorbed navel-gazing, because the focus is outwards, not inwards. Way to go, Gillie!

The boy with the loaves and the fishes, Rebekah at the well and many others in Scripture 'did what they could.' This is all that God asks of any of us. If we bring what we have or do what we can as an act of worship to Him, it is our heart attitude that He sees and loves. The woman at Bethany who broke her alabaster flask of spikenard oil over the Lord Jesus' head was sharply criticised by others - but He said "She has done what she could" (Mark 14:3-9) How often we downgrade what we have to offer because it is small or because others may not understand our motives. But this lady still poured out her perfume and the widow still gave her mite, though neither act appeared to achieve anything much in themselves. By this I mean, the mite wasn't multiplied like the loaves and fishes and the lady with the spikenard was not elevated and rewarded as Rebekah was, but their attitudes are spoken of still as memorials to them. There are two things t...

Of course, I had a difficult pregnancy! Not only did I suffer with the dreaded high blood pressure from the very beginning, but there was also the added complication of learning to do housework for the first time. And let me tell you, learning to iron a shirt is a harrowing experience when you've already turned twenty-four! He virtually abandoned me in a strange land, the man I married did. Went and joined the Police, didn't he, then disappeared into the winds of the Welsh countryside on an Advanced Driving course, leaving me to cope with my difficult pregnancy and the washing up? He phoned me often though - I'll give him that - to see how I was coping. "It's the English summer," I told him. "I don't like it! The days are too long. The wretched birds wake up at 4 a.m. then sit in the lilac tree by my window bragging about it." (I had discovered In myself a deep-seated loathing of cuckoos. The beastly things sound exactly like their mechanical c...

We wept together, then we laughed together, my friend and me. As I left, she said "Elizabeth, you're a tonic!" Driving home with a lighter heart, I asked aloud "Lord, what's a tonic?" It was merely rhetorical. Of course I knew the answer - it's a nasty tasting liquid that's supposed to buck you up! Well, the answer came all the same and was not what I had expected. 'A tonic is the keynote, Elizabeth, the first note of a scale. If you strike the tonic, the songster can sing the whole melody in tune.' My heart soared. "Lord! You're lovely."

There was this boy. He came up to me one day after class in a Bible College where I had given a seminar talk and told me it had blessed him. He smiled at me and I was pleased. He said he had liked hearing me talk because the way I said things had been easy on his ears. He was English and young - maybe twenty. I'm middle-aged - yet he gave me something. It seems to me now that it was part of himself, for he made a lasting impression on me. I noticed how thin he was - the bones of his face so prominent. The following week, I looked out for him. I wanted to smile at him and respond to his friendliness. But I never spoke to him again. That week I found out he was dying. Hurt flooded my heart. It was like receiving news about a close friend. He went away soon after - away to die. His family in Britain wanted him home. The last time I saw him, he was laughing, cutting up a cake to share in farewell, trying to cheer up the people around him who were grieving for his sake. From the edge of...

"I felt that a minister should know God so well that when he came into someone's living room he could almost sit down quietly and open his soul in such a way that God's love in his life would create a real hunger for Reality in the souls of the other people there and lead them to God too." "...something came into my life that day which has never left. There wasn't any ringing of bells or flashing of lights or visions, but it was a deep intuitive realisation of what it is God wants from a [person], which I had never known before. And the peace which came with this understanding was not an experience in itself, but was rather a cessation of the conflict of a lifetime. I realised then that God does not want a [person's] money, nor does He primarily want their time, even the whole lifetime a young seminarian is ready to give Him. God, I realised, doesn't want your time. He wants your will ; and if you give Him your will, He'll begin to show you ...

Lord, what a change within us one short hour Spent in thy presence will prevail to make - What heavy burdens from our bosoms take, What parched grounds refresh, so with a shower! We kneel, and all around us seem to lower, We rise, and all the distant and the near Stand forth in sunny outlines, brave and clear; We kneel how weak, we rise how full to power! Why, therefore should we do ourselves this wrong, Or others - that we are not always strong; That we are ever overbourn with care; That we should ever weak or hearltes be, Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer, And joy, and strength, and courage, are with Thee?

'The secret of the will is simply this: that the Christian life must be lived in the will, not the emotions, that God regards the decisions and choices of a [person's] will as the decisions and choices of the [person themself] - no matter how [their] emotions may be. Moreover, when the principle is applied, the emotions must always capitulate to the will.' Catherine Marshall, Beyond Ourselves