The Most Precious Year

While traveling through Europe in 1874, Frances Ridley Havergal, in her late thirties but always somewhat frail, contracted typhoid fever and arrived home ill. By November, she was hovering between life and death as prayer meetings were held all across England for her. For months afterward, she was confined to bed. But her recovery was marked by cheerfulness, optimism, and patience.

A year later, this was her testimony: I have just begun to work a little . . . after twelve months of ‘Jalling apart”: typhoid fever, which, with relapses and results, kept me ill for eight months, and part of the time very suffering, and then four months of very slow convalescence. But it has been the most precious year of my life to rne.

It is worth any suffering to prove to oneself the truth of “when thou passest through the waters I will be with thee,” and worth being turned back (as it seemed) from the very golden gates, if one may but “tell of His faithfulness.”