by Catherine Marshall, 1967
Christy Huddleston, 19 yrs. old, volunteers to teach in a mission school in Cutter Gap, Tennessee in 1912 (Appalachia). She learns to love God and the poor mountain people who have it so hard. Some are mean, cruel. But in the end, love conquers. She teaches 67 children in a one-room school house. She is mentored by Miss Alice, a Quaker woman with a deep and joyous faith in God. She (Christy) thinks she is in love with David Grantland, the pastor, but on her deathbed she is pulled back from Heaven by Dr. Neil MacNeill, the mountain doctor, praying to God, confessing his sins and surrendering to God.
Beautiful book! Especially her descriptions of Heaven near the end:
Light was drawing me irresistibly, dazzling light, refulgent light of a quality I had had but hints before…The grass was dotted with flowers – I spotted buttercups and the orchid of fairy fringe and the vermilion of fire pinks, and mountain bluets like patches of sky fallen into the grass – all of such intense coloration that they were not like flowers at all: they were explosions of color…over there was the light…green wood, green wood, flower-starred grass. The air was crystal. It was as if some sun of suns was glinting off numberless prisms, shattering the light rays, deflecting them, reflecting them so dazzlingly that I had to put my hand up to shield my eyes…Bathed in its luster, the leaves of the trees, the blossoms on the boughs, the blades of grass did not seem to be lighted from the outside. Rather the light appeared to come from the inside of each object, from its heart, from its very nature…energy in balance. Something had been stripped from my eyes..For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face…”
She was dying of typhoid – the cove was in an epidemic and she had finally succumbed after nursing so many others. But, she doesn’t die. She is pulled back from the brink by Dr. MacNeill’s loving prayer to God at her bedside.