I always knew he’d come back.
Laura Alice & Claude Jr.
“I was sitting on the front porch,” the story went, “and I looked up and saw two young men come in the little gate and amble up the walk. But I really only saw one of them. And I said to myself, ‘Why, that’s Claude Jr.—and that’s the boy I’m going to marry.”
It was just like that. Both of them testified to ‘love at first sight’. And though that’s a rather dubious concept in our ‘enlightened’ age, I have to say that I believe them with all my heart.
He officially asked in the fall of 1941. A moment’s bliss—and then the war. Grandma’s eyes always grew misty when she got to that part in the story. Granddaddy was one of the first to go, and one of the last to return.
“Forty-eight months in the South Pacific,” she would murmur, as if to herself. “And I always knew he’d come back.”
“He calleth His own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.” So His merciful and miraculous leading is individual—“Thou (singular) shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee.” The temptation is great to imitate or to expect the same manner of guidance which God has given another. “What is that to Thee; follow thou Me.” His Word abounds in examples of His separate leading of His sheep.
(from the journal of Elisabeth Elliot, quoted in Devotedly by Valorie Elliot Shepard)