But I've been thinking of a woman who served the Lord by raising 11 children in the years before running water, electricity, antibiotics, minivans and educational public television. I am humbled by the enduring example of Sarah Edwards.
The power went out as I started to write this. Appropriate; get me in the mood as I type on battery power on my laptop; I'll have a taste of how her evenings must have felt. Blogging by candlelight, keeping the fridge closed to retain the cold; relegated to snacking on old chocolate bars in the pantry. My respect for her hard life is growing even now. Can you imagine life without ice cream in the freezer?!?
In 1727, seventeen year old Sarah was married to a young preacher named Jonathan Edwards, pastor of a church in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was an intense man, brilliant, philosophical and introverted. By his own admission, he was not full of social graces. He had graduated from Yale at age 19 to begin preaching. The Great Awakening, a revival that spread throughout New England in the mid eighteenth century, began in his parish. He wrote many forceful sermons which endure today, including "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and "Religious Affections." His life ended in 1758, shortly after he accepted the position of president at what would become Princeton University.
Sarah, a thinker in her own right, was his opposite and perfect counterpart, outgoing and gracious, and the consummate hostess to the steady stream of visitors which flowed through their parsonage. She carried the bulk of the job of raising their eleven children, disciplining, clothing, and feeding them all, cleaning and maintaining the home, caring for their farm, entertaining guests and filling her marriage with love and spiritual insight which her husband highly valued. She freed him to study, write, and attend to his congregation. He normally spent 13 hours daily in his study, though he always set aside one hour of the day to engage with his children. Sarah was responsible for the rest.
(At first I didn't think that sounded like much, but I stopped to consider it. A daily, guaranteed full hour together with no t.v., phones, or internet, not spent catching up with the bills, or reading, or in the garage working on some man project, would mean a great deal of interaction and conversation in a family. It sounds quite nice, actually.)
There is fair evidence to show they did their job. A study was done in 1900 on John and Sarah's descendants. By that year, their marriage had produced:
"13 college presidents
65 professors
100 lawyers and the dean of a law school
30 judges
65 physicians and the dean of a medical school
80 holders of public office, including:
3 US senators
mayors of 3 large cities
governors of 3 states
a vice president of the US
a controller of the US Treasury
Members of the family wrote 135 books...edited 18 journals and periodicals. They entered the ministry in platoons and sent one hundred missionaries overseas, as well as stocking many mission boards with lay trustees." (You can find this in a book called Marriage to a Difficult Man by Elizabeth Dodds, pages 31-32, which I have just started reading and want to share a bit.)
The study went on to list all kinds of industries and businesses that descendants of the Edwards owned or had charge of. "There is scarcely any great American industry that has not had one of this family among its chief promoters... Has any other mother contributed more vitally to the leadership of a nation?"
Talk about a legacy. I'm glad at the end of the day that my descendants are still alive and the house is still standing. Maybe I should set my sights a bit higher. I will grant myself a bit of leeway; after all, she had a servant or two, and her five oldest children were girls. Those facts probably decreased some of the mayhem. But she didn't have flushable toilets or grocery stores down the street either... Or a dishwasher, washing machine, central heating, electricity, a local hospital, a government, a car, a computer, a refrigerator, or Facebook. And she left an impact. I don't want to be raising cain; I want to be raising the bar. I think it is right to be challenged by her example. It is all for God. I want to make the effort count!
Her husband once quoted her (I read this first in Faithful Women and Their Extraordinary God by Noel Piper),
"Oh how good...is it to work for God in the day-time, and at night to lie down under his smiles!.. But worldly business has been attended to with great alarcity, as part of the service of God... it being done thus, it was found to be as good as prayer."
There's a similar assessment at the end of a book on Andrew Murray and his wife on the impact of their family in South Africa. I think it was Andrew and Emma Murray (can't remember the author). And I read a book on the Beecher family which was also really interesting. It's a beautiful thing to see the impact of one godly couple on their offspring, and through them, the world. Susannah Wesley comes to mind, too.
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