Text and art by I. Lilias Trotter
Today’s find was beautiful to the inward vision as well as to the outward. Clusters of exquisite wild lilies, white and fragile and fragrant, growing out of the hot salt sand that drifts into dunes round the stunted juniper or lentisk bushes of that fringing shore. They spoke such a message of the reserve forces that had gathered below the surface in the lily bulbs and could well over into a tide of life that scorned all the difficulties of its environment in sultry days and arid soil. Not a leaf had come to give sign of their existence; the green and white flower buds thrust their heads straight out of the scorched sand, laughing to scorn the difficulties of their surroundings.
Sudden unfoldings have begun to appear, too, on the spiritual side – swift touches of God’s power falling here and there, rousing the spirit of expectation in those who watch with Christ in Moslem lands, as never before. But our hope rests, not in what we can see as yet, so much as in that which still lies out of view. “For with Thee is the Fountain of Life.”