Stepping Heavenward

I just had to get up from reading and share with you about this book.  I started reading it last Sunday, and any chance I get, I pick it up to read.  I am absolutely loving this book and am so challenged by reading about the journey of this woman from a young girl of sixteen who is so clueless about a true relationship with God to a wife and mother who through suffering, hardship, and true life learns what it means to be a daughter of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Seriously, I have highlighted about half of the book.  I think this will be one of my all-time favorite books that will be read over and over!

If you have not read it, I would highly recommend it.  Here are a few quotes that I just can't stop thinking about:

"If there is any one truth I would gladly impress on the mind of a young Christian, it is just this, that God notices the most trivial act, accepts the poorest, most threadbare little service, listens to the coldest, feeblest petition, and gathers up with parental fondness all our fragmentary desires and attempts at good works.  Oh, if we could only begin to conceive how He loves us, what different creatures we should be!"  page 68

"The more I pray and the more I read the Bible, the more I feel my ignorance.  And the more earnestly I desire holiness, the more utterly unholy I see myself to be." page 90

"...I shall now have one more mouth the more to fill and two more feet the more to shoe, more disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure or visiting, reading, music, and drawing. Well! This is one side of the story, to be sure, but I look at the other.  Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery.  Here is a soul to train for God; and the body in which it dwells is worthy all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant.  I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer to them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ's name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me.  Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother's heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her lifelong prayers!  Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!"  page 228-229

Stepping Heavenward, by Elizabeth Prentiss