Lessons from "Stepping Heavenward" April 2, 2007

I’ve been thinking a lot about the book I recently finished, Stepping Heavenward. This book is resonating with me as I ponder and evaluate my own walk with God and growth process, which I’ve often been frustrated with. First, I’ll give you a background to the story.

Stepping Heavenward is a book written by Elizabeth Prentiss (1818-187 who was the daughter of a revival preacher of the early 1800’s, Rev. Edward Payson of Portland, Maine. It was originally published in 1869 and had a wide circulation within the United States and several other countries. The current publisher wrote in the preface,

“The aim of her writing, whether designed for young or old, was to incite to patience, fidelity, hope and all goodness by showing how trust in God and loving obedience to His blessed will, brighten the darkest paths and make a heaven upon earth.”

That’s just what she’s accomplished with me, as I’ve voraciously eaten up this book. The description on the back cover reads,

“A nineteenth century Christian woman speaks through centuries in this timeless classic written in journal style. Follow her as she takes you on a journey to spiritual maturity from the age of sixteen - until just before her death.”

I should mention that this book is based on some of Elizabeth Prentiss’ life, but it is actually fiction.

I have sticky tabs on the pages I want to refer to again, and markings all throughout. This book is of such quality writing and subject matter that I consider it one of my favorite and most important books. What has amazed me as I’ve read this book, is how much I relate to Katy (the main character) and her passionate, yet tumultuous and sometimes painstakingly slow journey through life while growing in the Lord. She asks many of the same questions I’ve asked. She’s experienced many of the ups and downs I have (at least the feelings and questions that go along with them). I was encouraged as I read what others, or the Lord himself through his word, revealed to Katy which helped her move forward in her blossoming as a steadfast, faithful Christian woman. The wisdom that others in her life shared was truly remarkable - so many great pearls of biblical wisdom in this book to gather and learn from.

Part of the reason why this book has ministered to me so greatly is because of the resounding message of hope and peace in God’s sovereignty, which is explained throughout her life. It has only been in recent years that I have gained an understanding of God’s sovereignty (at least a beginning understanding) and how vitally important that knowledge is for a believer. It has been the most healing and restorative Christian doctrine I’ve come to understand, since I’ve previously walked through trials and tribulations of my own while being heartbroken or beaten down. The solid teaching on the subject has given me a sorely needed new perspective on trials - how to view them and learn from them. Katy experiences much pain and turmoil in her life, but she learns some of her greatest lessons about Jesus, and what it means to live on this earth, as she endures till the end.

Here are some quotes, among many, which I treasure:

1) About God’s love, which is available and endlessly reaches down to us when we feel our sin and wickedness:

Katy, speaking to her pastor, Dr. Cabot:

“You would not speak so kindly if you knew what a dreadful creature I am. I am angry with myself, and angry with everybody, and angry with God. I can’t be good two minutes at a time. I do everything I do not want to do, and do nothing I try and pray to do. Everybody plagues me and tempts me. And God does not answer any of my prayers, and I am just desperate.”

[Sarah here: Oh, how I relate to these cries of anguish!]

“Poor child!” he said, in a low voice, as if to himself. “Poor, heartsick, tired child, that cannot see what I can see, that its Father’s loving arms are all about it?”

I stopped crying, to strain my ears and listen. He went on.

“Katy, all that you say may be true. I dare say it is. But God loves you. He loves you.”

“He loves me,” I repeated to myself. “He loves me! Oh, Dr. Cabot, if I could only believe that! If I could believe that, after all the promises I have broken, all the foolish, wrong things I have done, and shall always be doing, God perhaps still loves me!”

“You may be sure of it,” he said solemnly. “I, His minister, bring the gospel to you today. Go home and say over and over to yourself, ‘I am a wayward foolish child. But he loves me! I have disobeyed and grieved Him ten thousand times over. But He loves me! I have lost faith in some of my dearest friends and am very desolate. But He loves me!’”

I came away, and all the way home I fought this battle with myself, saying, “He loves me!” I knelt down to pray, and all my wasted, childish, wicked life came and stared me in the face. I looked at it and said with tears of joy, “But He loves me!” Never in my life did I feel so rested, so quieted, so sorrowful, and yet so satisfied.” (page 38, 39)

2) About doing everything for Him:

Katy, talking to Dr. Cabot:

“I want to do something for God. And I can’t think of anything unless it is to go on a mission. And Mother would never let me do that. She thinks girls with delicate health aren’t fit for such work.”

“At all events I would not go today,” he replied. “Meanwhile do everything you do for Him who has loved you and given Himself for you.” (page 40)

3) About seeking pleasure and ease in this life and how that clashes with God’s purposes for us:

Katy, again speaking to Dr. Cabot:

“I would like next best to be learned and accomplished. Then I would want to be perfectly healthy and perfectly happy. And a pleasant home, of course, I must have, with friends to love me, and like me, too. And I can’t get along without some pretty, tasteful things around me. But you are laughing at me! Have I said anything foolish?”

Dr. Cabot replies,

“If I laughed it was not at you, but at poor human nature that would yearn to grasp everything at once. Allowing that you would possess all you have just described, where is the heroism you so much admire to find room for exercise?”

“That’s just what I was saying. That is just what troubles me.”
“To be sure, while perfectly healthy and happy, in a pleasant home, with friends to love and admire you -”
“Oh, I did not say admire,” I interrupted.
“That was just what you meant, my dear.”
I am afraid it was, now that I come to think it over.
“Well, with plenty of friends, good in an uncommon way, accomplished, learned, and surrounded with pretty and tasteful objects, your life will certainly be in danger of not proving sublime.”
“It is a great pity,” I said, musingly.
“Suppose then you content yourself for the present with doing in a faithful, quiet, persistent way all the little, homely tasks that return with each returning day, each one as unto God, and perhaps by and by you will thus have gained strength for a more heroic life…[and later] You may depend upon it that a life of real heroism and self-sacrifice must begin and lay its foundation in this little world, wherein it learns its first lesson and takes its first steps.” (page 46, 47)

4) About living for others, rather than oneself:

Katy’s mother:

“Dear Katy, I feel very sorry for you. But I see one path which you have not yet tried, which can lead you out of these sore straits. You have tried living for your self a good many years, and the result is a great weariness and heaviness of soul. Try now to live for others. Take a class in the Sunday School. Go with me to visit my poor people. You will be astonished to find how much suffering and sickness there is in this world, and how delightful it is to sympathize with and try to relieve it.”

This advice was very repugnant to me. My time is pretty fully occupied with my books, my music and my drawing. And of all places in the world I hate a sickroom. But, on the whole, I will take a class in the Sunday School.”

[Sarah here: I love the honesty here. Katy ended up "taking a class", which meant becoming a Sunday School teacher to small children in her church, and she absolutely loved it. Then later she did visit sick people with her mother. God used her mightily there and she learned a lot through the experience]. (page 4

5) About marriage, the arrival of a new child to the family, and how that tends to accelerate a mother’s spiritual growth:

“The coming of each new child strengthens and deepens my desire to be what I would have it become; makes my faults more loathsome in my eyes, and elevates my whole character. What a blessed discipline of joy and of pain my married life has been and how thankful I am to reap its fruits even while pricked by its thorns!” (page 180)

6) About how only God, in his supreme wisdom and sovereignty, knows the best time to bring a new life to a married couple for His purposes:

“And now I am waiting for my Father’s next gift, and the new cares and labors it will bring with it. I am glad it is not left for me to decide my own lot. Welcoming a new bird into the nest, dearly as I love the rustle of their wings and the sound of their voices when they do come. And surely He knows the right moments who knows all my struggles with a certain sort of poverty, poor health and domestic care. If I could feel that all the time, as I do at this moment, how happy I would always be!” (page 215)

7) About the need to understand God’s providence:

“Mother says we ought to study God’s providence more than we do, since He has a meaning and a purpose in everything He does. Sometimes I can do this and find it a source of great happiness. Then worldly cares seem mere worldly cares, and I forget that His wise, kind hand is in every one of them.”(page 216)

8. About the importance of not comparing one’s spiritual growth or giftings with other Christians. I appreciate the way she worded this - the understanding clicked for me, since this has been a long time pattern of mine. She realized that God is the one who sanctifies. It can’t happen in her timing or in her power:

“But there is no use in trying to engraft an opposite nature on one’s own. What I am, that I must be, except as God changes me into His own image. And everything brings me back to that, as my supreme desire. I see more and more that I must be myself what I want my children to be, and that I cannot make myself over even for their sakes. This must be His work, and I wonder that it goes on so slowly; that all the disappointments, sorrows, sicknesses I have passed through, have left me still selfish, still full of imperfections!” (page 226)

9) A metaphor for how God, the Great Physician, works in our lives through our trials:

A friend of Katy’s, Miss Clifford, explains:

“…but I have had some delightful thoughts of late from just hearing the title of a book, ‘God’s method with the maladies of the soul.’ It gives one such a conception of the seeming ills of life; to think of Him as our Physician, the ills all remedies the deprivations only a wholesome course for our good, the losses all gains. Why, as I study this individual case, and that, see how patiently and persistently He tries now this remedy, now that, and how infallibly He cures the souls that submit to His remedies, I love Him so! I love more so! And I am so astonished that we are restless under His unerring hand! Think how He has dealt with me. My soul was sick unto death, sick with worldliness, and self-pleasing and folly. There was only one way of making me listen to reason, and that was just the way He took. He snatched me right out of the world and shut me up in one room, crippled, helpless, and alone, and set me to thinking, thinking, thinking till I saw the emptiness and shallowness of all in which I had hitherto been involved. And then He sent you and your mother to show me the reality of life, and to reveal to me my invisible, unknown questions as to how much I am to pay towards the debt I owe Him?” (page 244, 245)

After hearing her friend say this, Katy writes in her journal:

 ”I was glad to be alone, to walk my room singing praises to him for every instance in which, as my Physician, He had “disappointed my hope and defeated my joy,” and given me to drink of the cup of sorrow and bereavement.” (page 245)

10) In the midst of a conversation with a woman who shared her concerns and fears of having a child with her husband, Katy, passionate about this subject, said:

“Yes, I am in earnest. I want to see little children adorning every home, as flowers adorn every meadow and every wayside. I want to see them welcomed to the homes they enter, to see their parents grow less and less selfish, and more and more loving, because they have come. I want to see God’s precious gifts accepted, not frowned up on and refused.” (page 256)

[this woman and her husband ended up deciding to allow God to bless them with a child, if it was his will. Katy met her again after the baby was born, and this new mother was grateful for Katy's encouragement, bursting with joy for the child God gave her.

11) Katy’s mother, on her death bed:

“But before I go I want once more to tell you how good He is, how blessed it is to suffer with him, how infinitely happy He has made me in the very hottest heat of the furnace. It will strengthen you in your trials to recall this my dying testimony. There is no wilderness so dreary but that His love can illuminate it; no desolation so desolate but that He can sweeten it. I know what I am saying. It is no delusion. I believe that the highest, purest happiness is known only to those who have learned Christ in sickrooms, in poverty, in painful suspense and anxiety, amid hardships, and at the open grave.

Yes, the radiant face, worn by sickness and suffering, but radiant still, said in language yet more unspeakably impressive, “To learn Christ, this is life!” (page 247, 248).

Oh, I’m so thankful this book was recommended to me (by Amy and Jess). Reading this fictional account, though based on the author’s life, fills me with emotion and passion for to know Him and live for Him. I don’t want to seek ease and pleasure the way I have. I see how all of the inconveniences, pains (great and small) are to be used by God to shape me into the likeness of his Son. But, as Katy realized, the process of my becoming more like Christ is in God’s hands. I can’t rush it. This has been a great comfort to my impatient self, since I wish I was already a mature, wise Christian. It’s in his hands. That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time.