a note to my happy friends

I've had a lot to say over the past year about suffering. But perhaps you are in a season of celebration. If so, I rejoice with you. Lilias Trotter has a timely word for souls in springtime:

From Lilias Trotter's Travel Journal, 1900

"You are right to be glad in His April days while He gives them. Every stage of the heavenly growth in us is lovely to Him; He is the God of the daisies and the lambs and the merry child hearts! It may be that no such path of loss lies before you; there are people like the lands where spring and summer weave the year between them, and the autumn processes are hardly noticed as they come and go. The one thing is to keep obedient in spirit, then you will be ready to let the flower-time pass if He bids you, when the sun of His love has worked some more ripening. You will feel by then that to try to keep the withering blossoms would be to cramp and ruin your soul. It is loss to keep when God says 'give.'" (A Blossom in the Desert, 111, emphasis mine)