"Just as I Am"
“I have to do more! I haven’t accomplished enough!” said the young woman. It was 1822, and she’d grown up among ministers and preachers all her life, though she hadn’t officially joined any church. But the Swiss preacher, himself a writer of hymns — as she would later become— would have none of it. “You must cut the cable now,” he said. The wind was before her — “the Spirit of God, and eternity.” She’d go back to that lesson again and again in her life, and maybe it’s a lesson that hard-pushing Americans should take heed of, too, if there are any of that breed left among us! Charlotte Elliott grew up in a time and a place when work was to take the place of holiness. “Blessed is he who has found his work,” said that mighty Scotsman, Thomas Carlyle. “Let him ask no other blessedness.”
Well, we do ask for another and a far greater blessing, and I think that Carlyle himself did, at his best. Miss Elliott did cut that cable, but still she often felt that she hadn’t done enough, and …
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