A young woman dedicated herself to God for mission service in India. As the time drew near for her sailing, an accident disabled her mother. The journey had to be postponed. For three years she tenderly cared for her invalid mother until death came. Before the mother died, she asked the daughter to visit her aunt in the far west. She went intending to sail for India immediately on her return. She found the aunt dying of a lingering disease and without proper care. Once again she nursed until the end came. As she turned her face eastward, her deceased sister's husband suddenly died, leaving five very young children with no one on earth to care for them but herself. "No more prospects of going to the heathen in India," she wrote to a friend. "This lonely household is my mission! "

Though greatly disappointed, she cheerfully submitted to the will of God and wholly gave herself to being a loving mother to those five children. For fifteen years she gave to them loving, motherly help and encouragement. In her forty-fifth year, God revealed to her why He had held her back from India, as she laid her hand in blessing, on the heads of three of the young people whom she had mothered before they sailed as missionaries to the land where, twenty years before she wanted to go! Her broken plan had been replaced by a larger and a better one!

—Selected