Chapter 5—A Time of Testing and Other Experiences

I will skip over some of our many interesting experiences. After a while we opened up the Branch sanitarium on the South side, Chicago, which had been closed for some time, and Mrs. Paulson and I took care of the patients there. We did not have very good facilities nor opportunities for medical work, but the place was full all the time and people stayed there and they got well; and the Lord helped us to do a good work in connection with our many lines of mission work in Chicago. But I saw circumstances were against us. What we needed to do was to establish a sanitarium work out in the country. Meanwhile the Battle Creek sanitarium burned and so they stopped helping us in any way financially. Up to that time they had helped us and co-operated with us. But they notified us after the fire that they could give us no more help. “You can close up everything in Chicago, or carry it on, just as you like,” was the word that came to us. I elected to carry some of it on.FF 60.1

From a human standpoint at that time the Chicago work had a sorry outlook. Some of our best workers naturally went to Battle Creek and they were of course needed there. Our gentlemen nurses had worked themselves nearly to death and they went home for vacations. Our folks had been turning away patients every day on account of lack of room. If there ever was a time when the Chicago work needed the Lord’s tender mercy it was then. My only comfort was in the fact that the Lord knew all about it.FF 61.1

We had many perplexities. From a human standpoint our outlook was almost disheartening, but then there were things that showed up on the other side of the question. A poor woman who spoke eight languages came in. She could talk with almost everybody on earth, but she had never learned to talk with God. She had had several surgical operations that were complete failures and she was in despair. Somebody directed her to our missionary dispensary and told her that we were honest. Dr. Colloran examined her, and she was brought to the sanitarium; she had another surgical operation and directly afterward was converted. We had a number of similar indications that the Lord was helping in spite of the discouraging circumstances.FF 61.2

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In the spring of 1903 I was asked to leave the Chicago work for a three months’ trip through Europe in the interest of the medical missionary cause. I somehow felt in my bones that when I would come back I should be able to accomplish more for Chicago. If I had had any other view, nothing else,—no board or committee on earth, could have made me believe that I should leave it for a single night. I had always wanted to go to Europe, but when brought face to face with the opportunity my attachment for the work in sin-cursed Chicago far overwhelmed it. But I went.FF 62.1

I saw and learned many things while in Europe, but I think the best thing I saw was up in Norway. I was called up there to see a patient and there was a treatment room. One of our nurses had gone back to Norway and instructed her brother how to give treatments. The way up to his treatment room on the second floor was through an alley. I walked up there, and I remember now his sitz bath was just an ordinary barrel that had been sawed down. His full bath tub was a box he had built and calked so it would not leak; and for his Russian or Turkish bath he had simply some cloth nailed on frame and stuck together, with another on top that the patients stuck their heads up through; then he had some alcohol under there and steam; and then he had his own brawny husky hands and a great big heart back of it all.FF 62.2

I met there the priest of that town, the schoolmaster, and the leading druggist, and asked them, “What are you doing here?” “Well,” they said, “The doctors could not do anything for us and this fellow is curing us.”FF 63.1

He was a fine, splendid man; he would not have been a better man if he had had an elaborate outfit. His outfit was cheap but he was not. I would rather have excellent men and a cheap outfit than to have an expensive outfit and cheap men. I have seen some elaborate outfits but something about the workers impressed me as cheap. Let us have first of all, mighty workers and then they will do mighty things with humble apparatus. The inside history of the building-up of any enterprise is largely written in prose, not in poetry. There is a great deal of God’s work that does not have a halo over it unless you have it in your soul.FF 63.2

When I see people planning and devising and scheming how they are going to do great things for God, and ask, “Have you talked to God about it?” and they say, “Oh, no, it is plain enough on the face of it that it ought to be done,” I feel sorry for them. There is such a thing as knowing the mind of God; and I am not so sure but that is a truth that needs to be emphasized more to-day than all the others put together. You can teach young people the message and how to give people the right kind of diet and all that, but they shrink from acquiring an experience that enables them to know the mind of God; and shrinking from that, their enterprise must be written in failure, even though they may have an expensive outfit.FF 64.1