“I'd Like To Ask Sister White ...”

82/182

You Must Have Been Happy When You Could Head For Home Again!

It is a beautiful day. We feared we should be obliged to ride in a storm, but we have a very good road and everything seems favorable. We are homeward bound today and expect before night to meet husband and children. At noon took a dry luncheon at an old hotel, while the horses were feeding. Joyfully, we again met our family. There is no place to be so dearly prized as home. 30 LASW 68.1

Was so thankful and happy to meet my family again and to be in the society of my husband and children I could not sleep. 31 LASW 68.2

Vacations

As a child, Ellen Harmon must have loved to play with her brothers and sisters on the beach at Portland, Maine, building sand castles for the incoming tide to wash away, or sailing toy boats in rock-bound ocean pools. Looking up, she could watch fishing boats and tall-masted, white-sailed ships glide in and out of the harbor. This little New England girl never dreamed that in later life she would voyage by steamship across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to become a foreign missionary, first in Europe, later in Australia. LASW 69.1

At least once when she was grown and living in California, Sister White enjoyed a holiday on the sea. One beautiful April day in 1876 she, with a group of publishing house workers, sailed out of San Francisco Bay through the Golden Gate to the open ocean. When the sailboat hit the waves of the open Pacific, some of the ladies became seasick, but not Mrs. White. She wrote, “The waves ran high, and we were tossed up and down so very grandly. The spray dashed over us. The wind was strong outside of the Golden Gate, and I never enjoyed anything as much in my life!” LASW 69.2

But she also loved the mountains. With her husband and her teen-age son Willie, Mrs. White had spent parts of the summers of 1872 and 1873 in the Rockies. Her niece had married a Mr. Will Walling, who operated a sawmill near Central City, west of Denver, Colorado. In a cabin owned by this man the Whites made their vacation headquarters. In her diary she wrote from day to day of their vacation experiences. LASW 69.3

In her writings, Sister White loved to describe the beauties of nature. She urged everyone to become acquainted with the great out-of-doors, God’s lesson book that reveals His love for His children. LASW 69.4