Stranded and Alone

“My flesh and my heart faileth; But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.” — Psalm 73:26 (ASV)

Back in Scotland, Mary spent most of her time at home with her mother and sisters, nursing baby Janie. In Calabar the child was believed to be cursed. In Dundee she was alive and loved. Her twin brother was not.

Asked to speak at meetings, she was so shy that she often could not open her mouth if men were present. But she knew what she believed about reaching people. “Nothing, I believe, will ever touch or raise fallen ones except sympathy,” she wrote to a friend. “They shrink from self-righteousness which would stoop to them, and they hate patronage and pity.” Sympathy and patience were what people needed.

Then her youngest sister, Janie, became seriously ill. Doctors said only a milder climate might save her. Mary asked the mission to let her take her sister to Calabar and live in a mud house together. They refused, kindly. So for a while Mary cut herself loose from the mission and moved her sister and mother to Topsham, a small town in Devon in the south of England. In April 1885 her other sister, Susan, died suddenly in Edinburgh. Mary was now earning nothing, and providing alone for her mother, an invalid sister and an African child.

Before going back to work, she asked her mother something. If the chance ever came to go up-country, into places no missionary had reached, would she let her go? Her mother's answer stayed with Mary all her life:

“You are my child, given to me by God, and I have given you back to Him. When He needs you and where He sends you, there I would have you be.”

She sailed again in November 1885. On New Year's Day 1886 she wrote a long, happy letter home. She ended, “Tell me all your troubles, and be sure you take care of yourselves.”

She never got an answer. Her mother had died in December, within weeks of Mary sailing. Three months later, on 5 March 1886, her sister Janie died too. “I, who all my life have been caring and planning and living for them,” Mary wrote, “am left, as it were, stranded and alone.” On the night the news came, she led her usual prayer meeting and told nobody. Then she wrote:

“Heaven is now nearer to me than Britain, and no one will be anxious about me if I go up-country.”

That is grief talking, and something more. Everything she had worked for since she was eleven had been for her family. Now there was no one left to send money to and no one to worry about her. She was free, with the terrible freedom of the bereaved.

She went to Creek Town, and her house filled up again: little Janie, rescued twins, boys and girls from different families. A baby was brought whose mother had died, and Mary asked the child's owner to lend a woman to nurse it. The answer came back: “Let it die.” Her biographer's comment is four words long: “She let it live.”

In October 1886 the mission decided to send her where she had been asking to go: Okoyong, inland, where no missionary had lived. She borrowed David Livingstone's words: “I am ready to go anywhere, provided it be forward.”

The psalmist says, “My flesh and my heart faileth.” He doesn't pretend to be fine. But he finds that God is still there when everything else is gone. If you are grieving, you don't have to rush to the “but God” part. And if grief ever turns into feeling that you can't go on, tell a safe person: a parent, pastor, teacher, doctor, or a crisis line where you live.

One thing to do this week: think of someone who has lost a person they love, even if it was a while ago. Send them a short message this week saying you remember. Grieving people often feel that everyone else has moved on.