Lilias Trotter: The Artist Who Chose the Desert

Lilias Trotter was a young woman in England with a wonderful gift: she could paint. She saw colour and light in a way few people ever do, and one of the greatest art teachers in all of England, a famous man named John Ruskin, told her that if she gave herself to painting she could become one of the greatest artists the country had ever seen. It was a dazzling promise, and it was true.

But Lilias loved Jesus more than she loved painting. She had begun to help poor women and girls on the dark streets of London who had no one to care for them, and slowly she felt God drawing her heart toward a harder and far less glamorous life. She had to choose between the fame her teacher promised and the quiet, costly work she believed God was asking of her.

Lilias chose God. She laid down the brilliant future in art that everyone said she should have, and instead she sailed for North Africa, to the land of Algeria, to live among people who followed a different religion and who very rarely heard about Jesus. To many it seemed a terrible waste of a great gift.

In Algeria, Lilias found the work slow and lonely. Few people would listen; some who did believe were treated cruelly for it; and results came only a little at a time, like water soaking into dry ground. Yet she did not give up. She learned the language, made her home among the people, loved the children, and stayed for nearly forty years — almost her whole grown-up life.

And her gift was not wasted after all. Lilias used her paintbrush to make little books full of beautiful pictures that told the story of Jesus in ways the people around her could understand and treasure. She had given up being famous in order to be faithful, and she had learned that the smallest, hardest life poured out for God is worth more than the grandest one kept for ourselves. The desert she chose came to bloom, in the end, because a great artist decided that Jesus was her masterpiece.