THE DOUBLE PORTION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 10, 1895

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 21, No. 40.

THE DOUBLE PORTION.

The “double portion” is often the only remedy for our losses. Nearly forty years ago a girl just stepping into womanhood bade good-by to parents, friends, and home, and set off across the American continent to China, on the way to meet her missionary lover, who had gone out some years before to make ready for her. Several months went by, and the friends waiting in the old home received her first letter. She wrote: “I have traveled for seven months through strange continents and over tempestuous seas to meet my beloved, and I have found the grass seven months green upon his grave.” The missionary friends wished to take her to their own house, but she refused. “Let me go to the home he made for me,” she said, and there she took up her abode. Thirty years after, visiting her native land for the first time, with a record of missionary work behind her such as few women have ever achieved, she said: “From some people I believe God takes away the pain of loss for the asking. With others of us he leaves it all unlighted, and only gives the strength to bear it. So it has been with me, that I might the better realize the desolation and the darkness of the lives of those Christless Chinese women.” So she won her “double portion.”—Selected.