Harvey Files: Women's Biography

The missionary was but one of generations of sufferers who have been ministered to by Streams in the Desert, a book that has often been called “The best-loved devotional of our time.” The secret of this remarkable book cannot be understood apart from the life of the author, who through the shock and astonishment of her own deep grief gradually gained rich insights into the methods and purposes of God. She was Mrs. Lettie B. Cowman, who after the passing of her husband served for many years as president of The Oriental Missionary Society.
A missionary executive, an internationally-known speaker, the organizer of Gospel distribution missions, Mrs. Cowman will be remembered most as an apostle of consolation. As long as there exists spiritual need, physical pain, and the torment of unanswered questions, her sacred collections will minister their sweet fragrances and God’s people will be blessed. The life of Mrs. Lettie Cowman will remain a great standard of faith and forever an illustration of the sufficiency of divine grace in the midst of suffering.
Lettie Burd Cowman was born to Isaac and Margaret Burd in Afton, Iowa, on March 3, 1870. This life that was to be marked by sacrifice had its improbable beginning amid conspicuous plenty. Although Lettie’s parents had come to the frontier state as pioneers, their life savings sewn into their garments, Mr. Burd was not long in establishing himself as a successful banker. Soon his generous income made possible comforts quite foreign to the life of the average frontiersman. The Burd home was distinguished by an atmosphere of culture. Lettie was early surrounded with art, literature and music. It was a comfortable life which offered abundance and made few demands―the kind of life which sufficiently indulged in may leave the soul with little taste for the way of the Cross. Lettie later acknowledged, “In a sense, Charles Cowman was my savior. He saved me from the life of wealth, leisure, and plenty.”
Lettie was the last of the Burd children, arriving on the scene after all of her brothers and sisters had left home. Continually in the presence of adults, she matured rapidly and beyond her years. To fill the emptiness of her child’s world she turned for companionship to the world of books, music, and nature, developing a lifelong appreciation for these things. Sensitive to beauty, she never ceased to look with genuine awe at the magnificence of a sunrise or marvel at the miracle of a budding rose.
Relationships destined to have the most profound effect upon human lives often begin with no more than a casual encounter. “Today I met a dear lad at the railway station,” Mrs. Burd announced one morning. “He seemed so clean and fine, but with an air of loneliness about him. I thought he needed some mothering, so I invited him to the house.” The boy’s name was Charles Cowman. Just a youth, he had recently left home to take a job with the Western Union Telegraph Company. Soon Charles was making regular visits to the Burd estate.
Between the lonely banker’s daughter and the young telegrapher far from home there developed a friendship that filled deep vacancies in both lives. Lettie’s parents, however, made it painfully apparent that they regarded the deepening friendship with something less than approval. It was with considerable relief that they received word of Charles’ transfer to a distant telegraph office. Certainly the separation would bring a welcome termination to the teenage romance, they reasoned. Charles, however, had other plans. Before leaving he drew Lettie aside to a favorite meeting place by the lake; there he declared in no uncertain terms his intentions. Her response was immediate and eager. “I love you, Charles,” she stated simply. “I promise to wait for you.”
While Lettie solemnly kept her pledge to Charles, her parents were devising a scheme that provided a two-fold advantage. Why not send Lettie to Vienna to pursue her musical interests? Her teacher had already proposed a musical career for the girl. More than that, the term abroad would make the continuation of the stubborn friendship almost hopelessly impractical. The plan was advanced with considerable fervor. Large sums were spent on clothes and appropriate accessories. But the Burd’s designs were in the end thwarted by the adamant will of their daughter. After all, had she not promised?
Lettie was blossoming into womanhood. Talented, gay, creative, with a laugh like the light tinkle of a bell, it was obvious to all that the banker’s daughter was an unusually attractive and desirable young lady. Young men with the proper social rank and pedigree to satisfy the Burds pursued Lettie with ardor. One, an officer in Mr. Burd’s bank, was particularly acceptable to them. He offered to surround Lettie with the comforts to which she was accustomed and guarantee her considerable financial security.
But the parents’ enthusiasm for the match was not shared by Lettie. A second time, the ambitions of well-meaning parents were frustrated by the quiet determination of this young woman who would not take lightly her pledge.
At the age of twenty-one, Charles Cowman returned to the Burd estate. Behind him now were five years of outstanding service with the Western Union Telegraph Company. He came back with a new confidence well earned. Hardly out of his teens, he had been appointed manager of the telegraph office in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Although he could not offer Lettie wealth or the life of the drawing room to which she was accustomed, he promised her reasonable security and bright prospects for the future.
Witnessing the reunion of the young sweethearts, the Burds bowed before the inevitable. On June 18, 1889, in the Methodist Church of Afton, Iowa, Lettie Burd and Charles Cowman entered into a union which only God could have planned. The parents, smiling through their disappointment, gave the couple their blessing and a beautiful reception.
The Cowman’s first home was in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, high amid the towering grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. Magnificent as the scenery was, the altitude soon proved too high for Lettie’s heart. Once, at the point of death, God spared her life in answer to Charles’ desperate prayer. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Chicago where Charles rapidly advanced to the position of Western Union Division Chief with some fifty operators under his supervision. Now they enjoyed a generous income, and Charles was able to provide Lettie with some of the comforts which she had known earlier. Frequently, they were found at the opera or at some prestigious social event.
“What did an opera star have to gain by abandoning a promising career in favor of the vagrant life of a Gospel singer―to sing to restless children and church people, most of whom were unable to fully appreciate her talents?”
The question must have probed the soul of Lettie Cowman as she sat in the Grace Methodist Church, struck by the exceptional quality of the artist’s voice. A handbill brought to their door earlier that week had induced her to come. “Opera singer to appear in concert at Grace Methodist Church,” it had announced.
Not just an ordinary opera singer, Lettie decided as she listened. The voice revealed something more than artistry; it exuded a certain quality of joy, hardly containable, a kind of ecstasy quite foreign to anything Lettie had ever known. What had this woman discovered? What was it that induced her to so heartily relinquish the very things that she and Charles had set their hearts on? All in all, the service was a disturbing experience, and Lettie Cowman resolved not to return.
Nevertheless, the following evening at seven o’clock, Lettie, half annoyed with herself, was seated in the red brick sanctuary of the Grace Methodist Church. Music, the thing that had always charmed her, had now brought a sudden discord into her life. What was it in this singer’s voice that so troubled her, making her keenly conscious of gnawing dissatisfaction?
One night after the concert, an invitation was given. A group of children surged to the front to “give their hearts to Jesus.” A ten-year-old boy arose with a glowing face to declare, “I have found sweet peace in my heart.”
A woman seated next to Lettie Cowman turned to her and asked pointedly, “Are you serving the Lord?”
“No,” came the straightforward reply, “I am serving the world and myself.”
“Why don’t you give yourself to Jesus?”
“But I don’t know how.”
“I’ll go with you.”
A hand slipped into Lettie’s and she was guided down the long aisle to the place of prayer. There, kneeling at the low altar amid a cluster of children, a proud woman prayed the prayer of the penitent. The transaction was immediate and complete.
“I will never be able to explain it,” she said, “but from that moment, I belonged to the Lord.” The new life had taken root in her soul. Later when someone asked if she had always been of a religious nature and if she had followed God from earliest childhood, she quickly answered, “No, until I was converted I was full of the world, the flesh, and the devil.”
Charles Cowman noted that, “The change in my wife which immediately followed was a great surprise to me, for she at once separated herself from the world and testified that she was genuinely converted.”
Impressed by the change as he was, Charles was, nevertheless, far from enthusiastic about his wife’s sudden interest in religious matters. In the circles in which they now moved, this brand of religion was all but unmentionable. People who talked openly of a personal relationship with Christ were quickly dismissed as fanatics. But perhaps, more than anything else, Lettie’s glowing testimony for her Savior came to Charles as an uncomfortable reminder of a once-precious childhood experience at an altar and a more recent vow made to God at the bedside of his dying wife.
But nothing Charles could say would dissuade Lettie from her sacred commitment. With the same quiet resolve she had shown in keeping her love pledge to him despite parental disapproval, she now kept a higher promise. One Sunday morning she stood alone at the front of the 600-member Grace Methodist Church to take the vows of membership.
That Christmas, Charles, always the considerate husband, chose what he sensed was an appropriate gift for his wife―a Bible. Certainly the choice would please her, he reasoned. On the fly leaf he wrote briefly, “Lettie Burd Cowman, from her husband. Christmas 1893.” It was the first of many treasured Bibles whose thumb-worn penciled pages remain to this day as chronicles of a woman’s ever-deepening relationship with her Lord.
One evening Charles came home to present Lettie with tickets and an invitation to a performance of the grand opera. Lettie’s polite refusal confirmed Charles’ fears. With his wife’s drastically altered life, strong ties of mutual interest and ambition which had once bound them so closely had fallen away. In their place seemed to have come an ever-widening gulf. The consciousness of it came with a stab of pain. That evening he went to the opera alone but returned early with the complaint that the music was poor and the story inferior.
Soon after, a week of special meetings was scheduled at the Grace Methodist Church. Yielding to his wife’s urgings, Charles consented to attend one Sunday evening. It was a night they would both remember and thank God for. By the time they returned that evening, the Holy Spirit had crushed the ambitious young telegraph executive. In their home, Charles fell to his knees and with characteristic wholeheartedness presented himself to God. It was Lettie Cowman’s greatest triumph.
For Charles and Lettie the night marked a blissful reunion. They were one again―one in Christ. It was a wedding of hearts and spirits destined to glorify God and extend the Gospel to waiting continents.
Bible study, church attendance, and personal witnessing became consuming interests in the lives of the Cowmans. Their home, always a happy one, now became a center of Christian activity and a source of inspiration. And one by one, Charles was winning fellow telegraphers to Christ.
Yet it took a missionary convention at the Moody church in Chicago and an appeal by world missionary leader, A. B.Simpson (founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance), to dramatically arouse the couple to a consideration of the needs of a waiting world far beyond the telegraph office or the Chicago “Little Hell” slums where Charles regularly spent Sunday evenings witnessing. At Simpson’s call for volunteers for foreign service, Charles turned to his wife with a resolve she well understood, “This means you and me,” he said simply.
At first the missionary volunteers were drawn to India, but their hopes were disappointed when doctors refused to give Lettie a clean bill of health, declaring that her body was too frail to withstand the tortuous tropical climate. There seemed nothing to do but wait further direction. Meanwhile, they set about to prepare themselves for whatever ministry God might have for them. Both enrolled as students in the Moody Bible Training Institute.
No doubt it was in God’s plan that the Cowmans were not immediately accepted as missionary candidates. The months of waiting provided time and opportunity for a thorough examination of the soul life. Lettie, reared in comfort and accustomed to plenty, had long been attached to the amusements of the world. She was to discover that before the soul can be beautified with spiritual graces, it must first be stripped of worldly ornaments and trifling loves that sap the spiritual life and leave the heart divided against itself. Gradually under the tutorship of the Holy Spirit this was to be accomplished.
For years Lettie had been a devotee of light fiction. “A harmless diversion,” she would have described it. Now, however, there emerged a growing uneasiness. Such reading matter, she concluded, was blunting the keen edge of her Christian witness and spoiling her taste for the Word of God. Finally she confided to her diary, “I cannot continue to have companionship with the blessed Trinity while reading these novels.” Directly she consigned volume after volume to the fire.
If this decision was dramatic, it was not impulsive. The surrender was irrevocable and complete. Henceforth her mind would be fed exclusively on the Word of God and such writings as shed light on the Scriptures. She had made her choice. Narrow? Some dolefully suggested that she was removing from reality, isolating herself in the drab world of religion. But what did they know of the ever-widening vistas of divine truth that fling themselves before the seeker with irresistible appeal. Charles and Lettie had chosen to immerse themselves in the Book. It would be their meat and drink. Sensitivities tuned, they learned to draw from this great source rich satisfactions, even in the time of famine.
There were other alterations that God was making in the life of Lettie Cowman. One morning as she sat down at the piano, her eyes fell upon a sheaf of music―popular tunes, opera music, dance songs. Often this music had brought her pleasant distraction; the lilting melodies had occupied many an hour and often her fingers had plucked the sensuous chords from the piano with a certain gay abandon. But now this music had turned bittersweet. With pleasure came also the now-familiar uneasiness. Could it be that this, too, would have to be placed at the foot of the Cross? Looking again at the orderly pile atop the polished piano she heard, “Does all this glorify your Lord?” In an instant the decision was made. These, too, like trinkets now useless and cumbersome, must be dropped away.
During this period, the work of God in the life of Lettie Cowman was twofold in nature. Not only was her life being stripped for service, she was at the same time being equipped for service. Her natural timidity and reticence to attempt public ministry was gradually surrendered. In its place, God gave her unusual abilities as a public speaker. Lettie Cowman could move audiences with words. Beginning first with children’s meetings, then youth services―dramatic and often illustrated―she gained confidence and poise. People remembered her vivid presentations. Years later a youth worker at a camp recalled, “The young people were crazy about her. She kept us on the edge of our seats for two hours. While she was speaking, we seemed to lose all consciousness of time.”
With steady progress in the spiritual life came blessing and daily enrichment. Yet Lettie was not satisfied. She had received clear instruction regarding the work of the Holy Ghost. Now she longed for the infilling of the Spirit with the accompanying cleansing and empowering for service.
“One morning I rose at four o’clock,” she later recalled. “I wanted to pray and do some searching of the Word. Just as I knelt I felt an unseen Presence so near me I looked up to see who was there. I could not utter a word, but just felt hushed in that glorious Presence. A sweet rest filled my being, and I knew that the Holy Spirit had come to abide forever. Nothing has ever been able to shake the experience of that hour alone with God. For twenty-one years He has kept me through smooth ways and thorny paths, in battles and victories, in homeland and among the heathen and this morning as I pen this testimony the witness still is in my heart that the ‘blood of Jesus cleanseth me from all sin.’ His will is the sweetest thing on earth.”
That morning encounter remained in her life, not as an isolated attainment, but the basis of a daily and ever-deepening relationship with the Savior. Her emphasis was never on past experience, but rather, “God spoke to me this morning through His Word.” Her Bibles eloquently witness a living relationship with God; the margins overflow with daily bulletins from Heaven. One who made a careful study of her Bibles noted that “there is scarcely a page from Genesis to Revelation which has not been marked. In addition, there are brief outlines, quotations, dates, names, places.” The materials from these Bibles would fill a volume. Lettie Cowman loved God’s Word. She approached the Book with the reverent attitude of a listener, heart attuned to catch whispers of love, instruction, encouragement. Or compare her to a skillful miner working a fabulous lode from which he daily drew shiny nuggets or whole veins of precious metal.
By the turn of the century, the years of preparation were nearing completion. Of the deep inner work in two lives, God was able to say, “It is well; now they may go.” One Sunday morning, August 11, 1900, at 10:30 a.m., Charles received the call to Japan. But what of his wife? Would she now be willing and ready for a sudden alteration in their way of life? Would her dedication be good for that remote Oriental empire? He need not have worried. “Six weeks ago while I was alone,” she told her husband after he had announced his call, “God spoke to me about going to Japan. I have kept it hidden in my heart waiting the right moment to tell you.”
To the average American, the pre-jet world of Japan was little more than an exotic name―a quaint little island inhabited by small but friendly people, located somewhere in the general direction of China. In the Japan of 1901, the presence of white faces drew curious stares, even in the heart of the great metropolis, Tokyo. And to Charles and Lettie, the strange new world of rickshaws, kimonos, chopsticks, paper windows, and the melodic clop of wooden shoes was sometimes quaint, sometimes fantastic, often bewildering.
Their first home consisted of two upstairs rooms behind the Bible school classrooms in downtown Tokyo. Their bed―a mattress stuffed with bamboo leaves. A secondhand Japanese cook-stove indicated which corner of the home served as the kitchen. Meals were prepared in odd-shaped Japanese utensils and served on dainty Japanese dishes. In a land of culture bewilderingly different and alive with a strange commingling of foreign sounds, Lettie presided over the little household with dignity, grace, and a robust good humor. The remarkable flexibility that would not desert her through a lifelong kaleidoscope of experiences was already evident. Apart from occasional remarks and sketchy glimpses, however, we are left to imagine the personal sacrifices that must have gone into the Cowman’s early years in Japan. On one occasion, we know, the only food in the house was a piece of bread and some tea, which they served without apology to their guest―a distinguished British author.
The infant work of the OMS, enjoying a rapid growth, demanded the constant care and attention of the Cowmans and Kilbournes. There was the responsibility for the supervision of the churches and the administration of the Bible school. The work load meant that often they were kept busy till midnight, and usually the clatter of wooden shoes and noisy banging of the neighbors’ shutters heralded the predawn start of another day. Mornings and afternoons were crowded with school and church activities, and night after night an unremitting campaign of evangelistic services was held in the Gospel hall. Students and seekers often remained to pray far into the night hours.
It was an incredibly demanding life. Physically tired, they spent of themselves with abandon. An observer described them as working as “though possessed.” Indeed, they were possessed―possessed with certain awareness of the urgency of the hour and the unprecedented ripeness of the field. History would later prove them right; for Japan, those were in reality golden years of opportunity. The sight of Japanese daily coming to Christ was a tonic to weary bodies and exhausted spirits. In it they found constant renewal. “This is the greatest work in the world,” they exulted. “This is the work!”
Immersed as he was in the work, Charles found it difficult to keep contact with an ever-increasing host of friends and supporters whose sincere inquiries begged immediate and thoughtful response. In addition to the faithful Telegraphers Band, there were numbers of churches following the infant Society with their prayers and gifts. Every mail brought letters of inquiry concerning the mission’s policies and objectives. Who was to answer letters stacked in an ominous pile on Charles Cowman’s desk?
It was with the thought of easing her husband’s burden that Lettie took her pen to answer letters and write brief articles describing the work of the OMS in Japan. In doing so, a ministry was born. Some were quick to recognize her gift. Her words were well chosen and she wrote with direct and artless beauty, telling the story of God at work in human lives. Later, the entire Christian world would appreciate this woman, whose intimate acquaintance with good literature and instinctive knack with words had prepared her for the role of one of the great devotional writers of our time.
Soon the first OMS publication, Electric Messages, was born―a forerunner of The Missionary Standard. Thus named because the Society had sprung from the Telegraphers Band, Electric Messages was at first a simple four-page paper. For half a century, Mrs. Charles Cowman contributed to the OMS publication, and readers on every continent hungrily perused its pages for her rich wisdom and creative Scriptural insights.
From the year 1901, when the Cowmans first arrived in Japan, until their forced return in 1918, their lives were crowded with continual activity. Those years witnessed the completion of the Every Creature Crusade in Japan and the laying of unshakable foundations on which a great church would rise. From Japan, the Cowmans had watched the planting of the Korean church. Deeply rooted, this church, nourished by the blood of martyrs and spurred by the fires of persecution, was to outstrip all others and become a foremost example of a modern New Testament church.
To promote the expanding work, the Cowmans made several trips to the homeland and Great Britain. On these tours, Mrs. Cowman’s genius as a public speaker quickly became apparent. Disarmingly direct, winningly gracious, charmingly animated, she could take her audience with a word, a gesture. Quietly, without resorting to histrionic or masculine gesticulations, she could communicate the white-hot fervor of her soul and share the excitement and nobility of their calling. She employed her gifts without apology in the interests of a needy world.
Mrs. Cowman was at her best before large audiences. The greater the task, the less adequate she felt; hence the better the opportunity to prove her Lord, she reasoned. The thought gave her glowing poise. At many camp meetings, the Cowmans appeared in what was then fascinating and unique garb―Japanese kimonos. Behind them was a large map of the Orient on which was charted the triumphs of the Every Creature Crusades. As a result of this public ministry, the name of the small mission reached an ever-enlarging circle of friends―friends remarkable for their loyalty, and keystones in a worldwide constituency that would stand by the OMS through the long, difficult war years. Many of those loyalties were based on a personal acquaintance with Lettie Cowman and the impact of that single radiant life.
While still apparently strong and in his prime, Charles Cowman sensed he was nearing the end of his life’s work. One evening he said to Lettie, “I want to walk up the hill with you. I have a secret to tell you.”
That evening as the glow of a dying sun put a rim of gold over the mountains, he told her in a voice that sent a shaft of pain through her usually buoyant spirit, “I have been having such heart pains at night,” he said, “I fear I will die. If I go on with the crusade, I will die. If I do not go on, there are millions who will die without hearing of Christ.”
The crusade would go on, but its general would be forced to retire from the conflict. Hopeful friends spoke of a short rest, recuperation, and then a return to the field. But for Charles Cowman, the fuel was all but spent. To the Cowmans, helplessness and inactivity seemed a fate worse than death. A once-strong man was reduced to weakness and utter dependence, to watch from the invalid’s couch the progress of the crusade that had so long been his life. This was the exquisite agony that was the ultimate test of faith.
To understand the effect of Charles’ suffering upon Lettie Cowman, one must understand the unusual relationship that existed between this husband and wife. Theirs was a devotion embodying at the same time the noblest of romantic ideals and the highest concepts of spiritual union. Years never diminished, but rather increased, the fervor of this devotion. Lettie’s love for Charles can only be described as bordering on adoration. People remember that she always spoke his name with a certain awe, even reverence. She never ceased to cherish him as her hero. During her last interview she insisted, “Give me no credit for writing Streams; there never would have been a Streams if it had not been for Charles Cowman. Give me no credit for the OMS; if it had not been for Charles Cowman there would be no OMS. Give me no credit for World Gospel Crusades. Without Charles Cowman there would never have been a World Gospel Crusades.” She never ceased to think of herself as primarily and essentially his helpmeet―a devoted wife perpetuating and carrying out her hero’s divine vision.
Now, witness the scene. Charles Cowman is dying. His wife is also dying; she is dying another sort of death. It is the death that will bring her to that awful submission in which the object loved more than life itself is relinquished to His purposes. But this kind of death does not come easily. Her diary provides small windows into the drama being enacted. Amid terrifying doubts, they struggle for an answer. “Three weeks and practically no sleep,” she writes, “. . . tonight the pain and agony, the living death . . .” Once, only once, is it written in her diary, “This is a living hell on earth!”
More than relinquishing a life, it appeared that she must relinquish certain principles, once boldly asserted with a shining face and resounding certainty. What of healing? Does God not honor the prayer of faith and heal the sick? Had not scores of believing saints gone to their knees to plead for the life of Charles Cowman? What of those prayers? Through the furor of questions came a voice, “Are you more intent on his healing than upon discovering the purposes of God?”
With a new desperation, she turned to those sources that had so often given succor in the past. The Word, long enjoyed, now became more than her necessary food. It stood as the final bulwark between her soul and blank despair. Hours were also spent haunting secondhand bookstores. Her practiced eye had learned to track down choice volumes, dusty and all but forgotten on some dingy shelf. Through the sleepless midnight hours, long after the city was silent, she sat drawing from the volumes draughts of courage. Hungrily she devoured the pages marking, noting, jotting down rare truths to fortify her soul. Little did she know that the solace she was finding was not for herself alone; that in God’s larger purposes, she was amassing a fortune in consolation for generations of disconsolate ones. Streams in the Desert was being fashioned in the crucible of suffering. Later when a friend asked about the singular success of this book, she replied, “The other books were written. Streams was born.”
The valley was six years long and ever darkening. After Charles’ death, she found a slip of paper in the Bible addressed to her. It was hard to decipher and the message might be even harder to carry out. “Go on with the unfinished task,” it read.
“The unfinished task.” The words never seemed to be far from her consciousness. It was Charles’ passion, a passion that even the last agonies of death had not corrupted. Now in the absence of her beloved’s physical presence, she committed herself anew to the fulfillment of his vision. “If I were to step into heaven today,” she later said, “Charles would ask, ‘What are you doing here? Is the task finished?’”
A short time later she dreamed that a familiar highway extended before her. She recognized it as a road where she and Charles had walked together in the bliss of childhood. But they came to a turn in the road. At this point, the Lord appeared to take Charles away, but doing so He turned to her. “You will walk with Me along this shadowed pathway,” He said. “I will always be at your side. Charles’ work on earth is finished. He has drunk the cup and been baptized into suffering. Now he is at home.” To this Lettie responded, “Thy will be done.”
But the vision, even the inspiration of Charles’ life, could not dull the numbing sensation of aloneness that swept over her after his passing. In the place of the heaven-born union now seemed utter desolation. Her heart seemed dead. During this period, she seemed to have no sensible presence of the Lord. Alone, so alone. Alone in the house, alone in the quiet time, alone in the Word, alone in the bookshop, alone amidst friends, alone in crowds. Sometimes a stifling sense of guilt seemed to settle down upon her. She felt that she was battling through what she should have been believing through. And what of the future? She was fifty-three years of age. What remained for the aging widow of a missionary executive?
Instead of falling into the trap of self-pity, however, she began to praise. Through the past six years she had uncovered a rare formula. “My plan is to shun the spirit of sadness,” she says in a Streams reading. “I shun sadness as I would Satan himself.” This she did by turning to praise. Her life became a continual exhortation to praise. Two classic devotional pieces (still being printed today) came from her pen at this time, After All There is God and Praise Changes Things. In the latter she explained, “Many homes display the motto ‘Prayer Changes Things’ and the great blessing has resulted from this simple statement. We are all aware that prayer does change things. We know also, that many times the enemy has not been moved one inch from his stronghold although we have persisted in prayer for days and months―yes, and often years. Such was my own experience when passing through a time of great pressure and prayer did not change things. I came into possession of a wonderful secret. The secret is simply this: After we have prayed and believed, PRAISE CHANGES THINGS.”
In another place she testified, “It was a dark night in my life when the words, ‘Praise waiteth for Thee, O God in Zion,’ were impressed upon my mind. I had been waiting in prayer for months. The months were now stretching into years―piled up as it were before God. Could not I now wait in praise before I saw the answer, or must I wait for signs and wonders ere I believed His Word? God was waiting for me to take this final step in faith, and when I began to praise Him for the answer, to wait in praise, to ‘rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him,’ He began to answer in a manner that was exceedingly abundant above all that I could ask or think. The possession of that secret of victory has transformed my life and filled it with unutterable gladness.”
Awaiting the further unfolding of God’s plan for her, Mrs. Cowman began arranging her collection of devotional pieces and writings. Some were sent to a religious journal, God’s Revivalist, where her contributions appeared regularly for three years. Grateful readers requested that these devotional pieces be assembled in book form. Moreover, there came to her the growing conviction that God would have her pass on to others the comfort wherewith she herself had been comforted of God. Thus she began work on a book of devotional readings, one for every day of the year. God had already given her a title, taken from Isaiah 35:6. The volume would be called Streams in the Desert.
The publisher felt certain that the first edition of Streams would be the last. Three thousand copies, he reasoned, would more than satisfy the demands of personal acquaintances and friends of the mission.
With that first small and unheralded edition by a hitherto unknown author, Streams in the Desert began one of the most phenomenally successful careers in the publishing business. Today the book remains one of the choicest of literary properties and the incessant demands from the public have called for more than fifty printings.
Readers were not slow in discovering that here was a devotional of more than ordinary worth. The insightful readings, sensitively arranged, ministered particularly to an always large group of God’s people―those who were experiencing a “backside of the desert” period, as Mrs. Cowman termed it. These were people baffled by suffering, illness, disappointment, bereavement; those who felt that they were all but forgotten by God. Streams spoke to those who had difficulty relating their own sufferings to the noble and eternal purposes of a loving and all-wise God. The encouragement to unyielding faith that, despite all evidence to the contrary, sees God’s loving purposes in all things is the repeated theme of this book. The message then today comes as a veritable stream of life in a wilderness of despair.
In explaining how Streams came to be, Mrs. Cowman wrote many years later, “In the year 1373, Julian of Norwich wrote, ‘He said not, thou shalt not be tempted, thou shalt not be afflicted; but He did say, thou shalt not be overcome.’ We are to rise unvanquished after every blow; we are to laugh the laugh of faith, not fear. To preserve the fruits of a triumph one must help his fellow-warriors to gain a similar conquest. The strong muscular limbs of a soldier are retained by sharing his blood with the entire army. For this cause, Streams in the Desert was born. Its lessons shared have resulted in a fellowship with many thousands over earth’s domain.”
After Streams, Mrs. Cowman felt certain that God would have her preserve in writing the vision of Charles Cowman. She must write his life story. The task loomed before her large and insurmountable. Still wondering how to begin, something written by poetess Frances R. Havergal came as an encouragement: “Just in proportion to my sense of personal insufficiency in writing anything, God sends His blessing and power with it . . . I can’t, but really I can’t write a single verse unless I go to Him for it and get it from Him.”
A comfortable home far from distractions was made available to Mrs. Cowman, and there she settled down to complete the task. From poignant recollections still vivid in her consciousness, she set forth the image of her hero. The result was Charles Cowman, The Missionary Warrior. If the story suffers from lack of objectivity and an over-idealism, and if a halo is too often visible, the book is not lacking for want of challenge. Burdened with sentiment as it is, the biography is, nevertheless, a book of fire. As one has said, “It was her dramatic flinging of Charles Cowman’s burning torch to others.” And many a young person after reading Missionary Warrior resolved by the grace of God to take up that torch. Years later, when informed that the book was temporarily out of print, a missionary exclaimed, “That’s a tragedy. There’s no book I know quiet like Missionary Warrior. I’ll never get over the impression it left upon my life.”
One Thursday morning in March, 1931, Mrs. Cowman was called to the phone, never realizing that the call would eventuate in yet another devotional book. At the other end was a broken-hearted parent. Tearfully he explained that their only child, a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, had been suddenly taken from them in an auto accident. “Do you think you could come over?” he pleaded.
Looking into the faces of two parents masked with horror of an unbearable grief, Mrs. Cowman seemed to see them as representatives of many who amid the shock of a sudden bereavement are reaching for some straw of consolation. She determined that for these parents she would daily gather poems, quotations, insights into the Word―offerings of consolation. Many of these pieces would later appear in a second devotional appropriately described by the very word, Consolation.
The bereaved and disappointed seemed immediately to sense that in Mrs. Cowman they had a tender ally, a friend who would take their burdens to the throne making them her own. During World War II, the son of a well-known mission executive served on a United States destroyer which was sunk by enemy bombs. It was almost certain that the young man had perished. The father asked Mrs. Cowman to pray. Later he found her radiantly happy, rejoicing in God’s deliverance. “Not a bone of him is broken,” she declared. “God told me so. He gave me the assurance from His Word.” Every report, however, indicated that the son had been lost in action. In time, however, a message came from the son stating that he had been blown off the deck into the ocean by the force of explosion. Though severely bruised, not a bone had been broken.
On another occasion, the head of a large publishing house came to Mrs. Cowman during one of her frequent visits to the Moody Bible Institute. Desperately he explained that his business was on the rocks and there seemed to be no way of saving it. “Do pray for me,” he requested earnestly. Later when they met again Mrs. Cowman reported, “Seven times I tried to pray for you, but all I can do is praise the Lord. I know He is going to do wonderful things for you.” Her assurance was to prove well founded. Business began to improve, and today the gentleman is owner of a prospering international Christian publishing house.
During this period, Mrs. Cowman was preparing yet another manuscript. This third devotional book would bear the title Springs in the Valley and would be a companion volume to Streams in the Desert. The reception accorded Streams, along with the public’s enthusiastic response to her regular contributions to religious magazines, had established Mrs. Cowman as a Christian author of considerable stature. Yet she would protest, “I am not an author. I am a missionary. I never set about to write a book. Only when God gives me messages to strengthen my fellow-warriors do I preserve these messages in written form.” On one occasion she was heard to say, “I do not find materials; materials come to me, fly to me from all over the world.” These materials she found in an unlikely tract; an old, faded booklet; a crumpled church bulletin; or a tattered song book. While at work on Springs in the Valley, she recalled seeing a verse entitled, “Leave the Miracle to Him.” She was convinced that the verse contained a message God would have her include in her book. But how to locate the piece? Why not ask the Father to send it, she reasoned. Several days later, a paper came from England. There it was―“Leave the Miracle to Him.”
Following the death of Charles Cowman, his capable colleague and closest friend, E. A. Kilbourne, took the helm of the growing missionary organization. Only four years later, however, his earthly term of service expired and The Oriental Missionary Society was again without a president.
When Mrs. Cowman stepped into the role of missionary executive, there were questions in the minds of many. A devotional writer? Yes. An inspirational speaker, missionary, woman of faith? Certainly. But what did the aging widow, now approaching sixty, know of the complicated world of finance; the infinite and tedious details of book-keeping, passports, visas, international regulations; the handling of properties, deeds, building contracts? Some regarded the step as hopelessly naïve. Mrs. Cowman simply saw in it another adventure of faith; one more opportunity to put God to the test. And so with characteristic optimism, she set up headquarters at 900 North Hobart Boulevard, gathering her dedicated staff about her to daily communicate to them the ardor of her own spirit. Above her desk she placed a motto. The inscription summed up her outlook for the future: “God is able to give thee much more than this.”
It was this same emphasis that a young missionary en route to India, Wesley Duewel, would later remember. “Mrs. Cowman,” he said, “was almost Pauline in her approach to things. When we were in her home just before sailing for India, she gave us the Scripture verse, ‘I will do better things for you than at your beginnings.’ She was not just on the defensive. She was always ready to take the initiative for God.”
In 1933, at the age of sixty-three, Mrs. Cowman decided that God would have her visit the work in China. At that time, Japan had invaded Manchuria and her armies were fanning out across the mainland in waves of destruction and terror. After observing the progress of the work in Peking and encouraging the missionaries, Mrs. Cowman went south to the Shanghai center and from there to Seoul, Korea. In Seoul, missionaries from the three fields of Japan, Korea, and China had gathered at the Bible school for a spiritual retreat.
Those were unforgettable days. Seething political and national turbulence was stirring all of Asia. None knew when hostilities would erupt into a violent and calamitous war. Amid the perplexity of the times, Mrs. Cowman gathered the missionaries around the Word to trace again the ageless promises of “things that cannot be shaken.” In answer to the inevitable question, “What will become of the work?” came to her a growing certainty. “Missionaries may leave,” she asserted, “but the work will go on because it has been built on nationals and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” This had been the unshakable conviction of Charles Cowman. At this time she wrote a friend, “Native evangelism was born from above to meet the drastic challenge at a crucial hour.” The heroic record of national Christians facing indescribable tortures and persecution would prove how correct she was.
Although Mrs. Cowman felt her heart drawn strongly toward Asia, she received a certain and inescapable impression that God did not want her to remain on the field. Even missionaries had insisted, “Mrs. Cowman, you fight for us in another way, in another place. You can better care for us somewhere else.”
One night she opened the Word to 2 Samuel 21 and “Thou shalt go no more out with us to battle . . . it is better that thou succor us out of the city.” Within a month, she was on board ship bound once more for the United States.
She arrived home in Los Angeles exhausted, her strength spent. After a physical examination a physician announced, “Your heart is too weak to stand the strain. I advise you to immediately discontinue all public ministry. To disobey may be to drop dead.” These words were almost identical to the ones a doctor had used in so accurately describing the condition of Charles Cowman, followed by the same stern words of warning. Did this for her also signal the end of an active public ministry and the commencement of a gradual and painful retirement? She could not accept it as such. A scrap of poem she stumbled across seemed to be God’s message to her:
This hour a grander work awaits your hand
Than any written in the treasured past.
Lay to the oar! The tide runs fast,
Life’s possibilities are yet unspanned.
And from her worn Bible came the assurance, “Thou shalt prolong the King’s life.”
When an invitation came to speak at the Little Country church of Hollywood, Mrs. Cowman believed that God would have her accept, and as she put it, “Let Him do what seemeth best.” Her faithful nurse and companion, Lydia Bemmels, stationed herself on the platform, hypodermic needle ready for any emergency.
As Mrs. Cowman spoke, she became aware that something unusual was taking place in her body. Fatigue was replaced with rest; weakness vanished as she sensed a flow of abundant strength. Instantly, it seemed, healing was hers. A subsequent physical check revealed that her heart was absolutely normal. Ten years later she would still be addressing large rallies with the same fervor and crowds would marvel at her youthful animation, her seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm.
In 1936 the arrival of a cable from Swansea, Wales, touched off a chain of circumstances which was to literally fulfill the promise contained in the snatch of poetry: “. . . a grander work awaits your hand than any written in the treasured past.”
The cable invited Mrs. Cowman to speak at an “Every Creature Convention” to be held at the Swansea Bible Institute in Wales. She knew the school well and remembered that it was a monument to the incredible faith and prayer life of Reese Howells. (His life is dramatized in the book Reese Howells Intercessor.)
At the Bible College, Mrs. Cowman found that a host of missionaries from many lands had gathered. After her first message, Reese Howells came to her to say, “We want you to speak every night of the conference.”
As she told of Charles’ vision and the triumphs of the Every Creature Crusade, the vision like a divine incendiary was igniting one heart after another. Those present recalled that the atmosphere was charged with heavenly activity. Growing illumination left listeners more than inspired―some came away with a clear-cut plan of action to carry out the “Every Creature” plan in their field.
Following the convention, Reese Howells, whose life is a continuous illustration of divine guidance, spoke to Mrs. Cowman. “Remain in your room,” he insisted. “We will send meals to you. God has something to tell you.”
At 6.00 a.m. Sunday morning, August 10, 1936, the message came, “I have sanctified thee and ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” What was God trying to tell her? “A prophet to the nations.” To the nations? What more could she, a widow past sixty, do as a “prophet to the nations?” Perhaps she was a victim of delusions, a common phenomenon among the aging who look back with fond recollection upon more active days.
But the conviction remained inescapable. Gradually the plan took shape before her, bold and exciting. She was to carry out Charles’ Every Creature Crusade vision. She was to be God’s instrument in planting the Gospel in millions of homes in many nations. Quietly she recalled Charles’ final words, “Go on with the unfinished task.”
On Sunday of the following week as she walked across the lawn on the beautiful Bible school garden, she met Anna Lisa and Sanfrid Mattieson, who had just arrived from Finland. The Swansea Every Creature Conference and the report of the crusades in Japan had fired them with a vision for Finland.
Three hours of conversation with the Matttiesons left Mrs. Cowman numb with a consciousness of God’s presence. She had heard more than the pleadings of two of God’s children, she had heard the divine command. She must accompany the Mattiesons to Finland.
Mrs. Cowman had not come to Wales with any notion of extending the trip northward to Finland. God would have to provide funds, clothing, ship passage. Countless details would have to be worked out. Soon, however, it became clear to all the plan was more than a human whim. Every need was supplied. Funds arrived. A fur coat was loaned her for the Northland. The captain of the freighter on which the Mattiesons were booked even released his own cabin so that she might accompany them to Finland.
When The Kadir, a Finnish lumber ship, left Cardiff, Wales, the voyage promised nothing unusual. Before long, however, a mounting wind was driving the ocean into mountains of waves that rose and fell with increasing force. Several days later, passengers noted an ominous sign. The sky had darkened, and the water had turned from a rich blue to a deep, inky green. Cargo was lashed down and furniture secured; the passengers were ordered below. A violent gale now whipped the waves into a ferocious world of water that threatened at any moment to annihilate the staggering vessel. A radio confirmed the ferocity of the storm. “Some ships,” it reported, “have floundered and sunk; others have been carried against the northern cliffs and dashed to pieces.” Some, still afloat, frantically sent SOS signals as they were driven towards dangerous rocks and reefs.
The Kadir’s cook, a hardy Estonian woman, made her way through the heaving ship to find a passenger whose majestic imperturbability seemed to be the only calm on the whole trembling ocean. “This is terrible, terrible,” she moaned. “We’ve never had a sea like this. We are in awful danger! The ship cannot stay much longer.”
Tenderly Mrs. Cowman embraced the terrified woman urging her to trust in the Lord Jesus as her Savior, and commending them both with all on board to His mercy. Surely “the vision” was not to end with a doomed ship and a murky coffin at the bottom of the North Sea!
To halt the vessel’s plunging course toward the deadly reefs, the captain ordered that the anchor be lowered. For two days and nights they were flung helplessly about, entirely at the mercy of the frenzied waves.
Then it was over. A brilliant sun dispersed the leaden sky and shone down upon a quieted ocean. Arriving at port in Finland, they descended a swaying rope ladder onto the remains of a luckless wharf that had been largely demolished by the storm. Their voyage had been extended fourteen days. But they were in Finland. This was the beginning of the fulfillment of Mrs. Cowman’s call to the nations. Crusades launched during the following months were to cover large segments of Europe and several countries soon to be stranded behind communism’s grim Iron Curtain.
At Jackobstadt, they were greeted by Christians who had been in prayer for six days in preparation for their arrival. The next evening a missionary meeting was held. To the waiting crowd, Mrs. Cowman recounted the call of Charles Cowman, his vision to take the Gospel to “every creature,” and the dramatic fulfillment of that vision in Japan. The narrative that had so often fired the imaginations of listeners again seemed stirringly relevant. Her message concluded with a bold plan of action. Then she called for volunteers. Young men quickly stepped out in response to the challenge.
The following day crusade leaders pored over a map of Finland, charting the course the crusade would take. First, Finland would be covered with Scriptures in a systematic house-to-house campaign. Detailed maps of every area would be obtained and every advance recorded. Next, the crusaders would carry large packs of Scriptures to Lapland. They were to travel by sled or skis over snow-swept mountains and to remote ice-locked villages. Finally it was determined that Estonia’s two million were also to get the Word.
Once the battle plan had been formulated, tshey calculated the financial cost of the effort. The entire venture would take not less than $10,000.00―a sum of money that no one had. No one but God. At this point, Mrs. Cowman quoted a familiar and often-proved principle: “God’s man in God’s place at God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s support,” she assured them.
While evangelistic-crusaders, laden with Gospels, began their systematic coverage of Finland, Mrs. Cowman journeyed into the distant areas of Lapland. Protected from the winter blasts by fur coat and woolen leggings, she climbed aboard a picturesque reindeer sleigh to be drawn Santa Claus fashion over the frozen expanses. Small school houses were filled to capacity with scores who had come great distances to hear a unique woman tell about the power of God’s Word.
Meanwhile in Finland, crusaders found that the Scriptures prayerfully and systematically placed in each home were like torches touched to dry kindling. And whole towns, long anesthetized by the sterile formalism of a state religion, found themselves infected by the spiritual contagion of these evangelists. When Mrs. Cowman returned to the Finnish capital, a union crusade rally was arranged in the parliament building. Leading citizens and political figures were present. “When Christ said that the Gospel was to go to every creature,” she explained without apology, “He meant nothing other than to every creature.”
Everywhere the crusade was leaving in its wake fires of revival. Many witnessed that this renewed emphasis upon the divine Word was having a noticeable effect upon entire communities and churches. Young people were stirred by the sight of other young people in action. One youth, a gifted Finnish pianist, testified that God had called him to work among the Jews. Another reported a call to China. And many laymen―grass roots evangelists―moved out with urgency to proclaim Christ.
From Finland the crusade moved to Estonia where it also reached eighty thousand Russian refugees from communism. From there it spread to Latvia, Poland, Czechoslovakia.
Back in London, Mrs. Cowman met with Bible societies making bold demands and calling for massive orders of Scriptures. Now, even in the British Isles, concerned Christians were being jolted by the possibilities of Every Creature Crusades. Leaders in Scotland confessed, “We are simply stunned over this thing. To think that God had to send you clear from China to Los Angeles and then here to arouse us to action.” A Baltic States Committee was formed. What had happened in Finland, Estonia, and Japan must also take place in their country.
The Every Creature Crusades in Europe marked the last significant evangelical thrust in some ill-fated countries soon to be crushed by the senseless tyranny of Nazism or to fall prey to the greedy paw of communism.
Using Great Britain as a home base, Mrs. Cowman spent the following months in missionary journeys that took her to Switzerland, Paris, Luxembourg, and the Middle East. Everywhere she found Streams readers, and at every opportunity she sought to communicate the crusade vision. These travels brought her in contact with a host of stimulating and influential persons. In Zurich, Switzerland, she was guest of a noble family that opened their home for drawing room meetings. In Alexandria, she was granted a private interview with an eighteen-year-old youth soon to be crowned king. His name was Prince Farouk. She witnessed to him clearly, presenting him with a copy of the gospels especially bound in royal blue.
In Jerusalem, a visit to a factory where exquisite china is fired provided her with an object lesson she would use all over the world. In one corner she noted some beautiful china apparently discarded.
“Why is it there?” she asked.
“Oh, it was to be a chandelier in the king’s palace,” came the reply, “but it would not take the fire.”
“It would not take the fire,” she repeated to herself, seizing upon the words and seeing in them an intensely meaningful spiritual application. She asked for a piece of the discarded china. She would show it to many an audience challenging them, “No matter how hot God’s furnace, take the fire!”
Back in England she was invited to be the guest of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, exiled king of Ethiopia. His land had been wrested from him by the ruthless armies of Mussolini. The dictator had boasted that he would make the tiny country part of the New Roman Empire.
In the presence of the Emperor, Mrs. Cowman opened the Scriptures to Isaiah 54 and read, “For a small moment I have forsaken thee: but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.” This, she boldly assured the Emperor, meant that his exile was but for a brief time. The ruthless Mussolini would shortly be vanquished by the wrath of the Almighty.
In appreciation for the visit, the Emperor presented Mrs. Cowman with a ring of heavy Abyssinian gold known as the gold of Ophir. Then he remarked, “Since I have been in England, you are the only person who has ever spoken to me in this way about the Lord Jesus Christ. We deeply appreciate it.” The scene marked the establishment of a lifelong friendship―one that Emperor Haile Selassie would honor years later when, once more restored to his country, he would make a celebrated tour of the United States.
In the year 1941, Mrs. Cowman at seventy-one was impressed that she must attend the World Sunday School Convention in Mexico City. Seven hundred delegates from every republic in Latin America were to be present.
“Why has God brought me here?” she asked herself upon her arrival at the convention. She might easily and more logically have sent Dr. Serrano, the Spanish translator of Streams. Yet she remained confident that she was there on a divine errand, to keep God’s appointment.
Following the convention, a large Methodist church in Mexico City invited her to speak. Noted missionary author, Dr. Heugel, was her interpreter. After the message, a young lady approached Mrs. Cowman. In her outstretched hand she held a peso (about 20 cents).
“This is to begin a crusade in Mexico,” she said with childlike simplicity.
A peso. What was a peso among the millions of Mexico? Quickly the Holy Spirit rebuked her saying, “Give ye them to eat.” A peso―plus God. Millions in Mexico could be fed.
A second invitation came. This time she was asked to address the student body at the union Seminary in Mexico City. That morning sixty students heard the challenge to take up the crusade torch. Listening to Mrs. Cowman was also captain Alexandro Guzman, Mexico’s dynamic Salvation Army leader. As a Catholic youth, he had been saved through the secret reading of a Scripture portion. Captain Guzman came away from the service strangely burdened.
On the morning of July 29, 1941, the hotel desk informed Mrs. Cowman that there was a telephone call for her. Dr. Frederick Heugel and Captain Guzman were on the line.
“Captain Guzman and I must see you immediately,” said Dr. Heugel.
“Certainly, where can we meet?”
“In the seminary prayer room.”
“Good, I’ll be there.”
As Dr. Heugel entered the small sanctuary, it was with the announcement, “Captain Guzman and I spent last night in prayer. Mrs. Cowman, God has given us a vision for a Gospel crusade for all Mexico.”
“Do you know what a crusade costs?” was Mrs. Cowman’s instant reply. “It cost the life of my husband. You should not begin unless you are ready to go to the death.”
“We have counted the cost and are ready,” the men answered.
“Do you know what such a crusade costs in money?” she went on. “It costs thousands of dollars. I have only a widow’s two empty hands, but I promise I will give you whatever God puts in them.”
In the stillness of the prayer room, Mrs. Cowman understood why God had brought her to Mexico. Suddenly her heart filled with unspeakable joy. Before leaving Mexico, she placed an order with the Bible Society for the first 100,000 gospels. The bill arrived in Los Angeles before she did, a bill for $878.05.
In the office the following Monday, Mrs. Cowman handed the treasurer, Frances Black, a contribution of $15.00 asking her to total the gifts that had been received for the Mexico Crusade.
The office staff was called together for a prayer meeting. But curiously, the service was turned into a time of praise. Soon Frances returned with the report. “The amount we presently have on hand for the Mexico Crusade,” she announced, “is exactly $878.05.”
On December 1, 1941, seven days before Pearl Harbor, the Mexico Crusade officially began. (In Mexico it was called the National Evangelistic Campaign.) Soon the reports were arriving: “Seven thousand homes visited . . . greater sale of the Bible and Bible portions than ever before.” When Dr. Guzman held a week’s services in one large church, 200 members responded to the call for crusade volunteers. The fire continued to spread as the 110 churches of the Mexico Presbyterian Synod committed themselves to the effort.
Dr. Heugel reported, “God is blessing the crusade beyond anything we had dreamed. I never saw a church so moved. Churches are calling the crusade leaders faster than they can respond. The crusade is looming up as the greatest thing on Mexico’s missionary horizon.”
Later he wrote, “People are saying this is the greatest evangelistic work ever seen in Mexico.”
And finally, “A tidal wave of revival is sweeping over Mexico. The nation is being stirred as never before. Like a mighty stream the National Evangelistic Crusade, launched December 1, 1941, is sweeping everything before it.”
Dismayed, the Roman Catholic Church launched their own gospel distribution program―something hitherto unheard of in Mexico. “Wonderful,” exulted Captain Guzman, “after all, you can’t put out fire with gasoline.”
As the crusade continued its onslaught, enemy forces resorted to violence in an effort to check the progress of the evangelicals. Local priests ordered their zealots to drive the crusaders out. One crusader was martyred, ten others wounded. In one village, two crusaders retreated when they came upon a couple of battered bodies, gruesome evidence of the violent disposition of the towns-people. Checked by the Holy Spirit, however, they returned to the village resolved to fulfill the purpose for which they had come. “You start distributing on this side of town,” the captain directed, “and I’ll begin on the other side. We’ll meet in the market place, or we’ll meet in Heaven.”
Final statistics of the Mexico Crusade read, “Participants: 11 denominations, 180 congregations, 180 ministers, 30 prominent laymen, 1,500 workers. Number of gospels distributed: 1,455,000.”
“I had not had such guidance in more than forty years,” Mrs. Cowman wrote of an experience that was to completely reshape The Oriental Missionary Society. “I had retired to a quiet room in a small hotel in Winona Lake, Indiana, presumably to work on a book. But I could not write. I spent three days in an agony of soul burden. What could it mean?” Her attention was drawn inexplicably to Judges 1:15 and the words, “Thou hast given me a southland.”
The year was 1942. War had closed doors to Europe. In Asia, the work of the Oriental Missionary Society had been forced to a virtual standstill. Missionaries in China had been herded into huge concentration camps.
“Thou hast given me a southland.” Could this mean that the OMS was to enter the field of Latin America? There was no escaping it. The impression refused to leave.
The Cowmans had never seriously envisaged work in South America. The very name of the society seemed to preclude anything of this sort. Now, what of this strong inner urge? The voice, she recognized. She knew well that she dare not ignore it.
“All right, Lord,” she finally conceded, “Latin America then, it must be. But You must send us a man to lead the advance into the field.” For days she waited before the Lord with this single petition, “Lord, send us Your man.”
The plea was still in her heart some time later when on a tour of the Free Methodist Publishing House she met Dr. Ben Pearson, editor of their youth publication. Dr. Pearson had not only served as a general superintendent of the denomination’s youth organization, he was also a veteran of twenty years service as superintendent of Mexican Missions in the Southwest. These facts registered very quickly in Mrs. Cowman’s mind. More than this, here was a man whose reckless faith and huge love for people distinguished him as a leader shaped from the same mold as Mrs. Cowman herself. Both immediately sensed a warm kinship―that rare meeting of minds and spirits committed to and mastered by a common purpose. Before leaving, Mrs. Cowman felt led to say, “Pray for me, Dr. Pearson, I have a call to South America.”
Dr. Pearson could not shake off the effect of that brief meeting. Several months later, two application forms appeared on Mrs. Cowman’s desk. At the bottom were signatures that made her heart suddenly leap: “Ben and Emma Pearson.”
“Have you a call from God, Dr. Pearson?” was Mrs. Cowman’s first question when she reached him by phone.
“I have,” was the immediate reply. Mrs. Cowman had found God’s man.
In August, 1943, Dr. Pearson and William Gillam were sent to establish a beachhead in Columbia, South America. Soon after they arrived they were joined by John Palmer, an English missionary who had served for a number of years in Latin America. Missionary directors Harry Woods and Edwin Kilbourne arrived later to help locate a suitable property where a Bible training center could be built. They found a beautiful estate, “Les Cerezes” (The Cherry Trees), just outside the city of Medellin. The owner, for health reasons, was being forced to sell the property. He was asking $20,000.00, a large sum, but actually only about half what the property was worth. Dr. Pearson, William Gillam, and the visiting directors were satisfied that this was God’s chosen site for the OMS work in Columbia. In a step of faith, they fixed their signatures to the contract, committing the OMS to the purchase of Les Cerezes.
“Frances, God wants us to empty the Streams in the Desert treasury and send it to South America. Our brethren there are needing money.” The directive came without warning one morning as Miss Frances Black busied herself with the accounts. Frances had learned to respect Mrs. Cowman’s sudden impulses, yet she hesitated. Could it be that today she was acting hastily? After all, there was $20,000.00 in the fund. No word had been received from the directors in South America requesting funds.
Soon enough, however, she discovered that in Mrs. Cowman’s mind the matter was an urgent one and there was no delaying the issue. “Frances, have you forwarded the Streams money?” Mrs. Cowman asked later that same day. This time Frances was not slow to comply with the unusual request. Later it was surprising only to those who knew little of the ways of God and the faith of Mrs. Cowman to learn that Dr. Pearson, Bill Gillam, and the OMS directors on the morning after they had signed the contract for “Les Cerezes” had an airmail envelope placed in their hands. The enclosed letter read: “God spoke to me. He said, ‘Empty the Streams treasury and send it to Columbia.’ I do not know what this money is to be used for. I am sure He will make it clear to you when it arrives.” Accompanying the letter were four checks for $5,000.00 each―exactly the amount needed.
In her seventy-fifth year, Mrs. Cowman made her final missionary journey to attend the dedicatory service of the new Bible seminary in Columbia and to witness the miracle that had its strange beginning that day in her Winona Lake hotel room.
On the field, she again recounted the leadings of her Lord; the mysterious providences that had moved her from Asia to Europe and then to Mexico and Latin America, striving to finish Charles Cowman’s “unfinished task.” Missionaries and nationals alike listened with quiet reverence. Primitive jungle Indians, often shy of the foreigners, were drawn irresistibly by the magnet of this beautiful soul that seemed to exude the love of God. They had no words to explain it. They simply understood here as in Japan, Korea, and Estonia: “That woman loves us.” When the time came to leave, missionaries and nationals gathered at the airport in a memorable farewell scene.
As her plane circled and then disappeared over the rim of the Andes, it signaled the end of an era. A creative missionary of world stature had made her last journey to a foreign land.
Though a lifetime of foreign service had ended, it would be a mistake to suppose that for the remaining years of Mrs. Cowman’s life she contented herself with the seclusion of a comfortable, well-earned retirement. The life that had given so unsparingly could not but continue to spontaneously spend itself for others until the last ounce of strength was exhausted. Following the example of the seasons, Mrs. Cowman was actually entering a glorious and colorful autumn of life―a period remarkable for its continuing creativity. Her pen, always busy, was still providing her publisher with manuscripts.
One morning a youth leader entered Mrs. Cowman’s office with a strange request. “Give us a book for the youth of our generation,” he said. Mrs. Cowman recalled the words of David, “When I am old and gray-headed, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation.” In answer to the request came a classic devotional for young people entitled Mountain Trailways for Youth.
Following Mountain Trailways came yet another devotional volume; this one with a special ministry to the elderly was called Traveling Toward Sunrise. “Letters poured in to me from many in the eventide of life,” Mrs. Cowman explained. “They felt caught in the web of discouragement―others felt unwanted. To this vast company, Traveling Toward Sunrise presents a reminder of God’s unfailing promise, ‘Even to your old age I am he; I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry . . . you.’”
These two devotionals written in her seventies reveal the astonishing breadth of one woman’s sensitivities. Concurrently she was able to minister words of understanding to youth while at the same time speaking to her own contemporaries as she accompanied them into the sunset years.
During these years Mrs. Cowman’s ever-broadening vision conceived of two additional organizations. The services of publishing and gospel distribution, she concluded, could better be carried out by independent organizations not bound within the structure of The Oriental Missionary Society. This conviction led to the establishment of World Gospel Crusades and Cowman Publications.
Mrs. Cowman’s resignation was accepted and she was given the deed to 256 South Hobart Boulevard, the small home where she and Charles had shared their Gethsemane and where Streams had been born.
On March 3, 1950, her eightieth birthday, Mrs. Cowman planned a reception to be held in the newly-remodeled home. As guests arrived, she presented each with a delightful booklet which she had written especially for the occasion. Its title: Life Begins at Eighty.
The small bungalow appropriately named “Oasis” was in fact all that its name implied. Its atmosphere was noticeably pregnant with divine presence. Now a world-renowned figure with books appearing in many languages, her guests included leaders from every walk of life who made pilgrimages to see her, to share with her their burden, to receive her benediction. Haile Selassie, on a tour of the U.S., made a special point to seek out his old friend at the Oasis to express again his appreciation for her prayers and encouragement through the dark days of World War II. Departing missionaries sought her out, all the while looking into her winsome features as though trying to discover for themselves the secret of this life.
Although still in demand as a speaker, failing eyesight now made public appearances increasingly painful. When a TV program requested that she appear before the cameras insisting that thousands of viewers were anxious to see her, she replied not ungraciously, “If people want to see me, let them read Streams. My picture is in Streams.”
These were years given to correspondence. Her still-glowing pen supplied touches of Heaven to scores of fainting hearts. This ministry recognized no doctrinal or denominational distinctions. To each she gave some part of her spirit.
Meanwhile she kept daily contact with World Gospel Crusades and Cowman Publications, the two organizations which, with the OMS, sought to perpetuate the Cowman vision. Those who visited her home were treated to fresh reports of God at work. “Twenty thousand New Testaments in Modern Greek have just gone to be distributed to the Greek army,” she would exclaim excitedly, or “Rejoice with me, the first half-million gospels have just gone to Formosa in response to an appeal by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek on behalf of the Nationalist soldiers.”
“God tells me I will enter darkness in 1957. I do not know whether it is death or just a tunnel. When we have the light, we trust the light. When it is dark, we trust Him.” Such was the announcement Mrs. Cowman made to the board of directors of Cowman Publications at her home on December 31, 1956. The message was delivered quietly, without self-pity or noticeable emotion. But there was an absolute finality about the pronouncement. None dared question her further.
“Enter darkness.” The directors wondered, could it mean blindness? For more than a decade she had been suffering from poor eyesight, and as early as 1940 had confided to a friend, “Pray for me. I fear I may lose my eyesight.” An operation to remove cataracts had been only partially successful. They knew that most of her reading now was done by listening to the voice of her faithful companion, Lydia Bemmels, as she read from some chosen volume.
It happened as Mrs. Cowman had said. In January, 1957, in her eighty-seventh year she entered a final dark corridor of her mortal life―three years of almost total disability from which she would never recover. Almost completely helpless, it was no longer possible for Miss Bemmels to care for her. Reluctantly, friends arranged to situate her in a rest home where she would receive the benefit of constant professional care.
Immediately following the move, she made lists of friends she wished to come for a “farewell visit.” She also listed the few cherished possessions she wanted given to friends. Whatever their intrinsic value, they were priceless to those who received them. They remain momentous of a remarkable life and trophies of great adventures for God. Among them were: A Chinese carved table; her silver service; a silver cup from the Koreans who later perished at the hands of communists (“This,” she explained, “must be used as a chalice.”); a painting of her as a girl, face framed with gold locks; their marriage certificate; a bronze table bell; oriental vases; a light gold chain worn when she was a child; a gold thimble; her Bibles, limp and crowded with markings from Genesis to Revelation; Charles’ books and her library; and finally, Haile Selassie’s covenant ring of the gold of Ophir.
When friends arrived for a last visit, she was too weak to stand. Yet with another helping her, she rose to deliver a final benediction in a scene reminiscent of Moses charging his people before his final solitary ascent of Mt. Nebo.
This was no time for small talk, for trite expressions of sympathy, or hollow words of cheer. God had told her that her time was approaching. She was certain about that. To friends who had so recently seen her talking youthfully in defiance of her years, the solemnity of that scene left them with a sense of sadness. Now, it seemed certain, she was leaving them. They departed feeling almost as if they were returning from a fresh grave.
After that she asked that no visitors see her―a request that many found difficult to understand. Now completely spent, it was as though the toll of years had finally caught up with her, subduing the flesh with devastating force. “I want my friends to remember me as I was,” was all she would say. Flowers sent to her would quickly be forwarded to another room. From her, nurses would occasionally bring a report that recalled the old spirit: “The crusade must go on.”
One night Heaven’s doors seemed to be opening. “Yes, Charles, I’m coming,” she said and then, “Don’t you see Jesus?” But days became months, and months years while concerned friends prayed and wondered how long the weakened frame could hold the once-irrepressible spirit.
Mrs. Cowman’s biographer, Dr. B. H. Pearson, suggests, “There is something mysterious in these days. She had ministered to suffering all her life. She had written a volume that in recent years probably was the companion of more aching hearts than any book but the Bible. It seemed that as His Son in the garden was given, so God the Father was now giving her the cup to drink.”
Release for Mrs. Charles Cowman’s spirit came as the sun was sinking on Easter Sunday, April 17, 1960. Among her papers was found the following poem written in her familiar hand:
Finish thy work, the time is short.
The sun is in the west,
The night is coming down,
’Till then, think not of rest.
Rest? Finish thy work then rest.
Till then, rest never.
―In No Guarantee but God, By Edward and Esther Erny.