Today’s excerpt from A Life Hid with Christ in God is from a letter Susan wrote in her diary on January 8th, 1836. “I hope my hard heart has received a new impulse. I have sometimes been very cold lately–have done those things which I ought not to have done, and left undone those things…
Today’s excerpt from A Life Hid with Christ in God is from a letter Susan wrote in her diary on Sunday, April 6th, 1834. “The greatest deficiency of my soul is lack of love to Jesus, and of simple faith in His goodness…” (page 80)
Today’s excerpt from A Life Hid with Christ in God is from a letter Susan wrote to her sister in 1833. “…if you would be a happy Christian, if you would enjoy that ‘peace that passeth understanding,’ you must never rest satisfied until ‘every thought is brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.’ This…
As I was annotating the memoir of Susan Allibone, I came across a line from a hymn that Susan quoted in a letter to her friend. I was marking the references to verses and poems she often included in her letters, so I typed that unfamiliar line into Google and went down a lovely rabbit…
In Susan Allibone’s memoir, she often asks friends to pray for her. I was quite struck with how different her prayer requests are from my own. If someone asks me how they can pray for me, I usually ask for prayer about problems or difficulties I’m facing. Susan very rarely (maybe never?) asked for things…
Last year, I republished an memoir from 1850 about Susan Allibone, a remarkable woman from Pennsylvania who lived the last 21 years of her life in great suffering. After she died, a friend wrote the following to her family: “I have often been struck by the unselfishness of your sister. Most persons, afflicted as she…
One of the things I most enjoy about Susan Allibone is that while she examined herself regularly, she never got bogged down in self-absorption or self-abhorrence because of her sin. She knew Who to take it to in trust and thankfulness. From her diary Feb. 4, 1833“To become a devoted Christian is the earnest desire…
As my mother-in-law is dying from cancer, I’ve been reading excerpts from Susan Allibone’s memoir to her. It’s been such a precious time together and Susan has truly grown into a dear friend to both of us, a comforter to me and an encouragement to mom. Right now we’re reading through Susan’s thoughts on heaven…
I am working on my 2025 goals and will share them next week, but thought first we might need to catch up a bit. 2024 was a good but hard year and I was pretty quiet here on the blog. In January 2024 my father-in-law died and my mother-in-law was a widow for the second…
As a fan of many Puritan writers and pastors, I’ve studied self-examination for years. What used to be a very common Christian practice has fallen out of use with most believers today because we don’t know how to do it, or what it is, or understand how much we need it. Susan showed me not…