Stepping Heavenward

These illustrations are taken from an antique volume of my favorite book, Stepping Heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss. 

Publisher's Description:

"Stepping Heavenward is an intimate journal of a young woman who struggles with ordinary daily life just as we do. Her life is a constant struggle to "step heavenward" as she deals with disappointment, heartache, and tragedy. You'll find it hard to believe that this journal has not be written with your own pen!"

This is such an encouraging read! I have read it three times already and have gleaned something new each time. Below are some of my favorite quotes from the novel...

“But you will imagine that it is best that He (God) should at once enable you to see clearly. If it is, you may be sure He will do it. He never makes mistakes. But He often deals far differently with His disciples. He lets them grope their way in the dark until they fully learn how blind they are, how helpless, how absolutely in need of Him. What His methods will be with you I cannot foretell. But you may be sure that He never works in an arbitrary way. He has a reason for everything He does. You may not understand why He leads you now in this way and now in that, but you may, nay, you must believe that perfection is stamped on His every act.”

~Excerpt from Stepping Heavenward

"But, oh! I am so selfish, and it is so hard to practice the very law of love I preach to my children! Yet I want this law to rule and reign in my home, that it may be a little heaven below, and I will not, no, I will not, cease praying that it may be such, no matter what it costs me."

~Excerpt from Stepping Heavenward

“And there are my children! My darling, precious children! For their sakes I am continually constrained to seek after an amended, a sanctified life; what I want them to become I must become myself."

~Excerpt from Stepping Heavenward

"This is the testimony of all the good books, sermons, hymns, and memoirs I read- that God's ways are infinitely perfect; that we are to love Him for what He is and therefore equally as much when He afflicts as when He prospers us; that there is no real happiness but in doing and suffering His will; and that this life is but a scene of probation through which we pass to the real life above."

~Excerpt from Stepping Heavenward