Guiding Quotes - Florence Allshorn

Guiding Quotes
Florence Allshorn
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After I was born again in April 1980, my heavenly Father began to shape my life in the Spirit. Along with my new-found love of the Scripture (born of His life in me), I read every Christian biography or autobiography I could get my hands on. It is impossible to comprehend the impact these stories had in steering my path.

One very strong influence came from a thin, stained, blue-green linen book called Florence Allshorn by J.H. Oldham. Florence (1887-1950) was a missionary from Great Britain. She not only spent time abroad in Uganda, but she later focused on training young women. Her teaching was nothing less than the most resolute, persistent making of disciples for the King, Messiah Yeshua (Jesus).

Although I found her to be quite quirky, my heart thrilled to her words on friendship and her insistence on creating beauty and community in the most dire places. Beauty in her surroundings was not an option. Thriving in His selfless love in community, although difficult, was essential.

So, I took the old book and typed all the highlights into a new little book that I bound by hand so I could read her quotes often. Here are seven I would like to share with you. The verses at the end of each quote are mine (His). Enjoy!:

1. “God is a million times more sublime than my sublimest thought of Him! He’s the Lord of a beautiful, pure, and high sanctuary in my soul and sometimes, because I’m so wistful about it, I get a glimpse of the loftiness of it, and sometimes I imagine Him with no form at all, but love and tenderness and a great calling going in front of me, and I don’t see how I can ever do anything but follow. And I’m not content with goodness and niceness and duty which I have struggled for. Now I want Him, touching and speaking to me, and I loving Him. Words are beautiful things, and thoughts and knowledge, but I’m starving and they’re of no use to me… I want to be on the heights and drag everyone else there!”

Draw me unto you and let us run together! (Song of songs 1:4)

2. “Reason is such a stolid thing to guide by. It never told anyone to pitch himself into a failing battle. It never told a Christ to make the sins of others His burden, nor a man to make the purity of other men his agonizing endeavor. Reason tells you to do such dreadfully sensible things, and intuition is the glamour of God’s life in you that makes you do the high, foolish things and puts the lilt of God’s singing into your heart – or else why are you so suddenly mad with joy over nothing at all?!”

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6)
In Thy presence is fullness of joy! (Psalm 16:11)

3. “To love a human being means to accept him, to love him as he is. If you wait to love him when he is rid of his faults, you are only loving an idea. He is as he is now, and he is to be loved now as he is;
   I can only love a person by allowing myself to be disturbed by him as he is. I must accept the pain of seeing him with hopefulness and expectancy that he can be different. To love him with the love of Christ means, first of all, to accept him as he is, and because I love, to attack all that is contrary to God with all the energy of love. Christ’s love is exactly like that; it is entirely disinterested and selfless; it accepts you as you are, with all that is displeasing, disappointing and even painful for Him in you; it gives love whatever the response may be; it forgives and forgives endlessly.”

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. (1 John 3:16)

4. “I feel religion works too much on a subconscious feeling of suspicion, possibly because it is so concerned with sin that it loses the vision of the lovely thing a human soul really is, a thing trembling with hope, because somewhere, stifled to death almost but somewhere, it has
   a knowledge that it could become a child of God. It gets pressed down under these ‘self’ things, and no one is merciful enough to go down and get it out from underneath. I am always seeing it and whenever I do, I long to give it its freedom.”

He satisfies the longing soul and fills the hungry soul with goodness. (Psalm 107:9)
As far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12)

5. “There is all the difference in the world between religious people and Christ-like people. You can be religious and yet somehow keep self as the largest thing, because being consciously unselfish isn’t necessarily selflessness at all. But to be able to delight in God and others to such an extent that
   “I want” goes right out is the heart of it.”

But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. (Matthew 6:3)
I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your Law is within my heart! (Psalm 40:8)

6. “Womanhood means more than a bright vision of success in ‘a job’ – it means patience and longsuffering and the deepening of gentlenesses.”

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)

7. “The only way I can learn it is to do it, and one thing I am very sure of for myself is that to sit quietly before God doing nothing, only fixing the will gently on some expressive word like ‘O God, I want You’ or ‘Father’ or ‘Here am I and here are You’ makes a world of difference. Just as lying in the sun doing nothing (surrendering your body to it with the sun blazing down on you) affects your body and your senses, so this surrendering of the soul to that transforming Power affects the soul. And I believe that as truly as the sun changes the color of your skin, so that Power changes you at the center.”

But we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Amen! Love to you!

Sing to the Lord with Thanksgiving!

Shale Fragments™ - writings by Beth Ann Phifer is a division of Flower Girl Greetings, LLC. ©2024, All Rights Reserved.
Blessings and love in Him,
Beth Ann