Streams in the Desert

November 19, 2022

The handwriting is tiny and precise, revealing a penmanship honed from years of secretarial work. Comments in an old devotional originally published in 1925, this copy dating from sometime after 1950. “Streams in the Desert” was written by (in words of her own choosing) Mrs. Charles Cowman, formerly with her husband a missionary to Korea and Japan until her husbands failing health necessitated them returning to the States.

I write not to inform about the author, but about the original reader, my mother. The devotional deals mostly with trials, disappointments, and the patient waiting that often comes to the Christ-follower. Out of her own struggles in these areas, Mrs. Cowman wrote, encouraging those who would walk the same lonely and shadowy paths. I treasure this little book with words underlined and with short, cryptic comments in the margins, not so much for the author’s gentle wisdom, but for the light those neatly written commentaries shed on the inner life of my mother.

In response to a question I asked later in her life, she revealed a few of the ways life was difficult for her, how she faced trials and challenges that most people never knew she endured. The margins of this little devotional are filled with words such as “patience,” “waiting,” “sorrow,” “sickness,” disappointment,” “frustration,” and “tears.” I’ll never know exactly what lay beneath such words; I was never burdened with the cares she shouldered, as they were borne silently in the closet of her own prayers. For seventy years I was the beneficiary of the fortitude and faith that met each circumstance with a strength not her own. 

Whether we know it or not, every day we encounter people carrying crosses too heavy for them to bear. Some collapse right before our eyes; others bravely struggle on, hiding their burden behind a smile, a joke, or as often as not, anger, cruelty, and bravado. Few are bold enough to leave traces of their struggles as did my mother. I am grateful tonight for her devotional, for her comments, her prayers, her victories in hard-fought battles won at great personal cost. I am most grateful though, for the Lord Jesus Christ, her Savior and mine, whose strength, wisdom, comfort, and love carried her till the afternoon she bid this world goodbye to step into His presence to receive a crown and his blessing, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in little; I will give you authority over much. Enter into the joy of your Lord.”