Mission with Prophetic Power: The Journal of John Woolman (SRSC 12)

16

Mission with Prophetic Power: The Journal of John Woolman

for creation, openness to Christians from a variety of traditions, and the tragedy of slavery. We find in Woolman’s reflections on his early years the importance of a “right order,” as he draws together his values of inner sensitivity, measured speech, and the practice of truth into a harmonious life of integrity. T he T ext Childhood: Divine Care and Convictions (1720–1736) I have often felt a motion 1 of love to leave some hints in writing of my experience of the goodness of God, and now, in the thirty-sixth year of my age, I begin this work. I was born in Northampton, in Burlington County, West Jersey, in the year 1720. Before I was seven years old I began to be acquainted with the operations* of divine love. Through the care of my parents, I was taught to read nearly as soon as I was capable of it; and as I went from school one day, I remember that while my companions were playing by the way, I went forward out of sight, and sitting down, I read the twenty-second chapter of Revelation: “The angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev 22:1), etc. In reading it, my mind was drawn to seek after that pure habitation which I then believed God had prepared for His servants. The place where I sat, and the sweetness that attended my mind, remain fresh in my memory. This, and the like gracious visitations,* had such an effect upon me that when boys used ill language it

1 Motions, Operations, Visitations – Whereas we tend today to talk about “encounters” with God, being “touched,” or “the work of the Holy Spirit,” in John Woolman’s time Christians spoke of “visitations,” of a particular “motion” of feeling or will, or of the “operations” of God’s love more generally.