Expectation Corner Emily Steele Elliott (1892)

CONFLICTING DUTIES
the work done at each one of any six
specified stations.”
Then gravely opening his Bible at the
Epistle to the Ephesians, he read the
words: “For we are His workmanship, created
in Jesus Christ for good works, which
God afore prepared that we should walk in
them.”
“Long ago,” he went on, “I was rigid in
keeping to a time-table, framed, as I imagined,
for the carrying on of self-discipline
and active usefulness with the greatest
possible effectiveness. The least irregularity
in obedience to its calls served to chafe
my spirit. So many hours to study, so
many to parish visiting; so many to family
calls; in fact, I regarded a close adherence
to my own appointment of time as all-important.
“I had learned the first lesson of consecration:
‘all for Christ’; but I had not
learned the next: ‘All for Him according
to His ordering.’ Plans, system, mechanism
are indeed as much a necessity for
effectiveness in sustained Christian work
as are the venous and capillary organizations
of the plant; but all must be subservient
to that higher ruling which does
not come to us in supernatural revelations,
but in the everyday duties and in the often
prosaic, on-and-on occupations which are
part of His individual arrangement who
has said, ‘In all thy ways acknowledge
Him, and He shall direct thy paths.’
“He had to teach me that ‘redeeming
the time’ could only be effected by my letting
God’s time-table supersede my own,
by the recognition of His higher planning
as put forth upon the stops as well as the
steps—upon the hindrances as well as the
calls; and by the discernment of His will in
each so-called ‘trifling’ incident of everyday
life.
“And as we get further the habit of
childlike obedience should grow stronger.
We should learn more and more to look
upon circumstances as providences, and to
realize the soul-communion maintained by
a meeting of our thoughts with God’s
thoughts from moment to moment in the
good works which He has prepared that
we should walk in. He even now clasps
the exercise of a submitted will with, ‘If ye
be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the
good of the land’; and responds to ‘As the
eyes of servants look unto the hand of their
masters, so our eyes wait upon the Lord,’
with ‘I will guide thee with Mine eye.’ If
we are but in waiting, He will show us that
only one call at a time is really a duty; and
He who organizes the ministry of ‘angels
that excel in strength, and that do His commandment,
hearkening unto the voice of
His word,’ will give us, I increasingly
believe, endowments of method and of
organization which both multiply and
economize power. But let us ever remember
that the good works prepared are not
let down from heaven in twos and threes,
but just one by one in God’s order. As we
with faith and patience seek, day by day,
to follow in the pathway of His plans,—to
be ‘of keen scent in the fear of the
Lord,’—we shall know more and more of
that secret communion, of that mutual
‘pondering,’ which belongs to our following
them up according to His will, and to
His glory.”
Mrs. Stanton was silent. Dr. Elwin’s
words opened to her a momentary vista of
calm and spirit-rest such as had never
seemed to her within the range of possibility.
Could this region of tranquillity indeed
be attained by the mother of eight
children, a district visitor, a mistress of
house and family, and an organizer of
good works on all sides? The idea was
dismissed from her vision as belonging to
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