Excerpts from the diaries of Lilias Trotter; source here.
“Oh, the desert is lovely in its restfulness – the great brooding stillness over and through everything is so full of God. One does not wonder that He used to take His people out into the wilderness to teach them.”
Lilias Trotter (1853-1928) had a wealthy and privileged upbringing as part of an upper-class family in the golden age of Victorian England, schooled at home by governesses. In her twenties she grew in faith through the “deeper life” conferences being held across England in those days, and volunteered at the YWCA (then in its infancy) reaching out to London’s working girls, including the prostitutes who hung around Victoria Station.
But her other passion was art. When she was in her early twenties and her family was vacationing in Venice
He considered her artistic talent so great that he told her he could make her “immortal.” That is, if she would give herself wholly to her art.
Though tempted, she turned him down – a difficult decision but one that once made, gave her a sense of liberty; she was surrendered to God and would not cling to anything else. She later described it as "the liberty of those who have nothing to lose because they have nothing to keep." She wanted to put people first, and threw herself into the ministry in London.
Lilias never became a great artist. It does take a lot of work to become a master of anything, doesn’t it? And that’s not what she chose. She did however continue to fill up sketchbooks, and her letters and journals are well illustrated. (You can see some of her work here.) And more to the point, she continued to see the world with an artist’s eye.
Ruskin had taught her that someone who paints nature or humanity should not just use the two for their art, but that art is a means of seeing, a means of understanding and loving what you see, and helping others love it too:
“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”
When she was 35 Lilias left the urban ministry in London and went to Algiers
“None of us would have been passed by a doctor for any missionary society. We did not know a soul in the place, or a sentence of Arabic, nor had we a clue as to how to begin work on such untouched ground. We only knew we had to come. If God needed weakness, He had it! We were on a fool’s errand, so it seemed, and we are on it still, and glory in it.”
For the next 40 years she served there, as well as traveling along the coasts of North Africa and South into the Sahara on camel-back. She went places never visited by a European woman. They didn’t build anything impressive – nothing, really, but relationships.
She was sick a good bit of the time, and put much of her energy into praying for others who were doing what she could not. She also wrote devotional material that spoke to the hearts of North Africans and is a big part of her legacy. By the time Lilias died in 1928 they’d established 12 mission stations, and Lilias and left behind a team of 30 workers who continued reaching out to the people of North Africa . A biographer says she “pioneered means, methods and materials that were 100 years before her time.”
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So, there's your introduction to Lilias. I wanted to share some of her writings as well, but thought the context would be helpful. (Later - here's the second post: Full Face to the Sun)
See also:
Until the Day Breaks: The Life and Work of Lilias Trotter: Pioneer Missionary to Muslim North Africa , by Patricia St. John (1990)
A Passion for the Impossible: The Life of Lilias Trotter, by Miriam Huffman Rockness (2003)
A Blossom in the Desert: Reflections of Faith in the Art and Writings of Lilias Trotter, compiled and edited by Miriam Huffman Rockness (2007)
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