Six weeks ago I lost my father to colon cancer. He was my swimming buddy, my business advisor, my artistic role model. My family and I miss his great energy and joyful spirit every day. It is only our Father in heaven, really, that keeps us from despair.  

    As I grieve now for this first big loss in my life, I think about our forebears who faced the death of loved ones so much more frequently. Take, for example, the Victorian inspirational writer, Hannah Whitall Smith. 

    Best-selling author of The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, Hannah suffered the loss of her 5-year-old daughter Nellie. Then typhoid claimed her oldest son Frank at age 18, and the next year, her newborn baby died. Later, her 11-year-old daughter Ray succumbed to scarlet fever, just weeks after Hannah's own mother had passed away. In the midst of these tragedies, she wrote continually to her Christian friends, reflecting on God and the grieving process.

    After Frank and the newborn died in 1873, her letters practically flow with tears.  She wrote to her friend Mrs. Lawrence of her "most unspeakable sadness." Hannah reported that the only thing enabling her to accept the child's death was that "this life is the necessary passageway to the life beyond." But still she said, "From the bottom of my heart, I pity it."

    Reading Hannah's letters expressing her grief, I think about the importance to me of friends from my small group Bible study. Two of them have lost their own fathers to cancer, and I talked to these women almost daily during my dad's illness. They prayed for my family. They understood. The Lord wants us to pray together and to support each other.

    God gave us mouths to speak and ears to hear each other so that we can glorify Him together.

    We are all parts of His body, and the Bible tells us that "if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it" (1 Corinthians 12:26). My friends and Hannah's friends were not only helping us recover and even grow from our losses, but also honoring God by grieving with us.

    In 1880, soon after the death of her daughter Ray, Hannah wrote to her dear friend Mrs. Henry Ford Barclay, "The first moment I knew she was ill, I began at once to say 'Thy will be done' . . . and it seemed as if the sweet will of God came down like an enveloping fortress, and hid my soul in an impregnable calm. I know God's choice for my darling is a perfect choice; and I know she had gained by a short and easy road the home of blessedness toward which the rest of us are traveling with slow and weary steps. And in the face of this knowledge, how can I grieve?" 

    God gave me that "impregnable calm" while my dad was sick too. Some days I still feel like lashing out at God for allowing my father to suffer, but prayer, study, and counsel with friends kept those thoughts at bay. Mostly, I remembered that God was there during the ordeal, holding my father in His everlasting arms, ready to bring him home, ready to use his life as a powerful witness to all whom he touched.

    Mostly I remembered, and continue to remember, that God has blessed me wonderfully, with a fine mind and a healthy body, with loving family and friends, and a free country in which to live and work. Hannah Whitall Smith remembered these things, too, some 120 years before me. She wrote to Mrs. Barclay, apologizing for her blue mood: " . . . I have no feeling of complaining in my heart. My life is full of the dear children's interests and of sweet cares of my husband and parents."

    By September of 1880, Hannah had begun to gain perspective on the tragedies she'd faced the previous winter. She wrote to her sister Sarah that she had had "a revelation about guidance that seems to make obedience a far simpler thing." This revelation was that "the voice of God comes through our judgment, and not through our impressions."  Hannah reminded Sarah she had gleaned from the Bible that "He will guide the meek in judgment, and it is not said that He will guide them in impressions or feelings." (Psalm 25:9kjv) Her point was that religion is a matter of will, not emotion. We must do what is right according the Word, not what feels right according to our own whim.

    Some days, I know that my recently widowed mother feels like lying in bed and not getting up. However, she wills herself out of bed and to work. She's a schoolteacher, and for her, teaching every day does not make the pain completely subside, but it does show God her gratitude and her willingness to serve Him. In this way, she allows the Lord to guide her judgment.

    When I think about how my own recent trial has changed me, I realize that God worked in my family through our pain. He strengthened our faith, as fire burns away impurities in the smelting of steel. It did not happen by our doing, really. All we had to do was keep our minds on the Lord, and He took care of the rest. Hannah Whitall Smith articulates the process in her famous book.

    She complained believers too often assume that once they are saved, their task is done, as if their souls had arrived "at one moment in a state of perfection." Hannah understood that perfection was not attainable by anyone on earth, but she insisted that we as Christians should always be mindful to aim for it in our walk. She referred to the process as "growing in grace."

    To Hannah, growth in grace was not accomplished by self-centered effort but in relinquishing self to God. She compared the ludicrousness of trying to grow by our own strength to a boy's attempts to grow taller by stretching himself with ropes and pulleys. Instead of such vanity, she said, our spiritual growth would happen only when we are like the lilies of the field. In her words, "Self must step aside to let God work."

    Of course, Hannah realized that this stepping aside is something lilies don't have to do. Flowers have no ego. What lilies are by nature, the Christian "must be by an intelligent and free surrender." We must consciously abandon our own will to that of our Father. If we do, He will grow us, no matter how dry, dwarfed, or crooked our growing in the past has been. He will cultivate our patch of land, turning it "into the soil of grace the moment we put our growing into his hands."

    That the Lord wants us to grow in grace is evident in His Word. Take, for example, Romans 5:3-4, which tells us that we should "also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope." Turning our own desires over to God's will, and keeping our eyes on Him during our trials are two actions which together create the good soil in which Christians are to grow.

    Hannah Whitall Smith, in spite of all the pain in her life, remained a woman of joyful spirit well into old age. She persevered. She never lost hope.

    She was also a woman of good humor. In her letters, she joked about never once in her life having been able to balance her checkbookand about having a weakness for shopping when it came to dresses and lace. Her son said she climbed haystacks with her grandchildren and slid 15 times down a water chute with them on a single afternoon. Throughout her many trials, it seems that she was able to remember that her growth was not under her own control, but God's. Submission to Jesus Christ brought forth in her a renewing joy, which was her secret to a happy lifea secret she worked so hard to share with her adoring public.

Jane Shippen

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