A Changed Lassie

“It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.” — Lamentations 3:27 (ASV)

At eleven, Mary went to work at Baxter Brothers, one of the biggest textile firms in Dundee. She was a “half-timer”: half the day in the factory, half in the factory school. Soon she was full-time, and went to school at night. The day ran from six in the morning to six at night. She got up at five to do housework before she left, and there was more waiting when she got home. In the weaving-shed the belts whirred overhead and the shuttles flew, and the noise was so loud that talking was almost impossible.

She became a skilled weaver, eventually running two wide looms at once, and she stayed at the loom for about fourteen years. When she brought home her first wages, her mother wept over them and said they were too sacred to spend. They didn't stay unspent for long. The family needed every shilling. Her younger brother Robert died of croup in 1860. Her brother William died of tuberculosis in 1870, not yet twenty, and five months later her father died. At twenty-one, Mary was the head of the household in all but name.

She had almost no schooling, but she was hungry to learn. She propped a book open on the loom and read when the work allowed, and read walking to work through the grey streets. Above all she read the Bible. Once a girl asked her for something to read, and Mary handed over her own Bible: “Take that; it has made me a changed lassie.”

Outside the factory, her life was the church. Wishart Church stood in the middle of a slum, and gangs of boys ran the streets with nobody to control them. When the church opened a mission for them, Mary volunteered to teach. The older boys came to wreck the meetings, and they threw mud at her when she preached outdoors.

One story from those years has no named witness; as far as we know, it rests on her own later telling, so take it as a remembered story. A gang surrounded her one night. Their leader swung a lead weight on a cord round her head, closer and closer, until it grazed her forehead. She didn't move. At last he dropped it. “She's game, boys,” he said, and the whole gang followed her into the meeting.

Here's the surprising thing: Mary Slessor was afraid of crowds, afraid of speaking in public, and afraid of cows in fields, all her life. Her courage was not the absence of fear. It was staying put when she wanted to run.

She was also honest about her limits. A famous book told her to practise meditation, and it made her miserable. “I canna meditate,” she told a friend, “and Doddridge says it is necessary for the soul. If I try to meditate my mind just goes a' roads.” Her friend told her to stop worrying and go and work, “for that's what God means us to do.” She did. Her prayers were always the prayers of a busy woman, said in the middle of the work.

Lamentations was written in the ruins of Jerusalem, and it doesn't pretend the yoke is light. It says carrying it young can be good, because of what it teaches. The loom made Mary tough and patient, and it gave her a working woman's respect for the poor. Years later, standing among African women carrying loads on their heads, she never looked down on them. She had been a labourer herself.

Maybe you are carrying more than other people your age: work, younger siblings, a parent who leans on you. God doesn't waste those years. They can grow something in you that easier years can't.

One thing to do this week: pick one dull or heavy job you have to do this week, at home, school or work. Before you start, give it to God in one sentence: “This is for you.” Notice whether it changes how you do it.