The Week | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jan 6, 1909

The Week.

Beautiful was the first morning. A soft, warm rain had fallen in the valleys during the week. Upon the far mountains it was snow. When the genial December sun went down, the warm atmosphere of the valleys became rapidly chilled, and the result was a heavy hoar frost, which covered the earth, and gave the green shrubs and dry stalks in the gray dawn the appearance of just having emerged from a slight snow-storm. How bracing was the short walk in the frosty air! Clear, keen, and cold it was, and the sun arose with not a cloud in sight, and its glorious light transmuted the frost crystals into millions of sparkling diamonds. The whole atmosphere soon became athrob with life. From tree to tree on rollicksome wing flew the glad birds, and the old live-oaks were transformed into green music halls, with orchestras and choruses of glad feathered songsters, palpitant with life and joy and praise. Thus opened our week of prayer in California. It seemed that all nature was calling to the praise and seeking of God. How much more ought intelligent man, on account of whose subjection to sin the curse fell upon God’s perfect creation, to praise the Creator of heaven and earth, and to seek from the fulness of the fountain of life and power the grace which will restore in him God’s image! And the week closed as it opened. Morning after morning the same scene, the same clear, bracing air, the same brilliant, star-set heavens, the same clear, shining, waning moon and morning star, greeted us as we walked to our early morning meeting at our office chapel, where a goodly company gathered, whose prayers came up as one, and brought the promised blessing. In the church the first meeting included a social-meeting, and the last a praise-meeting, in which was not one dry, hesitating, long, wearisome, unharmonious testimony. It was indeed a season of refreshing.