"No Will Of My Own"

When two of her four children caught the scarlet fever, Elizabeth Prentiss was unable to make the trip that she and her husband had planned. Her husband, George was in Paris and she was in Switzerland with her four children, the plan was for Elizabeth to travel with the children to Paris when George got them a place to stay. In a letter to her husband she said:

"I need not tell you what to ask for the dear child, but for me do pray that I may have no will of my own. All these trials and disappointments are so purely Providential that it frightens me to think I may have much secret discontent about them, or may like to plan for myself in ways different from God's plan. Yet in the midst of so much care and fatigue I hardly know how I feel; I am like a feather blown here and there by an unexpected whirlwind and I suppose I ought not to expect too much of myself. 'Though He slay me yet will I trust Him,' I keep saying over and over to myself, and if you are going to write a new sermon this week, suppose you take that for your text ... I do trust that in the end we shall come forth from this troublous time like gold from the furnace."