Bildungsromans; Deception -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction; Women authors -- Fiction
I wish I might paint you a picture of that home as I knew it; of my
home, its counterpart; of the years the two families spent much time
together as one family. The days were one long dream. Hard work? Yes,
but good fellowship. Everybody working together with a common aim, and
joy in the work and the fellowship!
And the evenings! Oh, those evenings, the crown of the days, the time
to which we all looked forward as to a goal when our work was done!
Those evenings are bright spots in my youth. Especially the evenings
of the years we all spent together in Florida, when the sun went
down sharply and the light went velvet black at evening, until the
great tropical moon came out. Those long evenings when the soft dense
darkness shut us in to a cheerful supper table, and, after we had
hustled through the dishes, we all gathered in the big sitting-room
around the open fire for family worship. Yes, we were as old-fashioned
as that! We had family worship both morning and evening. And I am not
of those modern ones who tell such things to scoff at them and say how
sick they got of religion because of it, and lay to that their present
indifference to God and the Bible. I look back to those times as the
most precious, the most beautiful, the most powerful influence that
came into my life. I thank God for a family that worshipped Him morning
and evening and gave me an early knowledge and love for the Bible and
the things of the Kingdom. Either my uncle or my father would conduct
the little service, and often the one or the other of them would say to
my dear aunt: "You read the chapter to-night, Belle," just because she
was such a beautiful reader and we all loved to listen to her. At other
times, we would recite verses, all around, a verse apiece, and then
kneel in a circle for the prayer.
Oh, those prayers of the years that made my life inevitably acquainted
with God, and the Lord Jesus, so that I never could be troubled by the
doubts of to-day, because I know Him, "whom to know is life eternal."
I cannot be thankful enough for those prayers, and that sacred time of
worship every day that brought me into His very Presence.
And then the evening that followed!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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