Catherine Marshall

Somewhere in time, September 27, 1914, Catherine Marshall was born.  I wrote a few words about her first husband in my previous blog, but I have always been interested in Catherine Marshall.  I read the book, Christy, for the first time when I was about sixteen years old.  It’s still one of my favorite books.  Sometimes I think we have an image of perfect people living perfect lives when we think of heroes of the faith, but that is so far from the truth.  When we dig into people's lives, we find people dealing with hurt and loss and confusion just like everyone else. 

Catherine Marshall grew up in Tennessee. Her father was a Presbyterian minister with a small congregation in a small town.  She didn’t grow up with money, but she had a childhood filled with love.  She desperately wanted to go to college.  She had been accepted to Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, but her family didn’t have the money to pay her tuition. 

One evening her mother found her lying across her bed, sobbing. "She sat down beside me and said, 'You and I are going to deal with this right now . . . I know it's right for you to go to college. Every problem has a solution. Let's ask God to tell us how to bring this dream to reality.' And I prayed, 'Lord, I turn this dream over to You. I give it up. It's in Your hands.' " This first moment of youthful honesty set the tone for her entire life. "I was learning that the price of a relationship with [God] is a dropping of all our masks and pretense. We must come to Him with stark honesty 'as we are' or not at all." (www.christianbooks.com)

She was able to attend Agnes Scott and while there, she met the young Peter Marshall.  She was twenty-three when they married, he was thirty-five.  They both shared a love for God and a love for words.  They wrote a few things together that were published during their married life, but life was not rosy and perfect even as the wife of one of the most acclaimed minsters in America.  In 1943 she contracted tuberculosis.  The only treatment for this was bed rest for the patient.  Can you imagine how hard that must have been?  She had a young son and an active life and now she was confined to the bed.  During this time she struggled with questions of why.  Why would God let this happen to her?  Did God still have a purpose and a plan for her?

God has a purpose in everything. She recovered and the family purchased a small vacation cottage to give her a place to recover.  Little did she know, in 1949 she would be a widow.  She was thirty-five years old with a nine year old son.  The vacation cottage they had purchased became her home.  Not only did she loose her husband, but she had to uproot her young son and leave her friends in order to occupy the only home they owned, thier vacation cottage.   

God never promised us a perfect pain free life, but he does promise to be with us through the hurt and pain.  With faith in God, there is always hope.

Proverbs 23:18 (NIV) “There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.”

Here she was, a widow with a young son.  How would she support them both?  She decided to write a book.  It could be she was encouraged by the outpouring of love from the people that admired her late husband, or maybe it was a way to deal with her own grief, but she wrote a book about his life.  A Man Called Peter was a widely popular book and a movie, based on the story, came out in 1954.  Catherine went on to write several more books.  There is even an award given for Christian fiction in honor of her work.  It’s called the “Christy” award. 

If she hadn’t of faced the struggles she did, she may never have attempted to accomplish what she did in life. In the words of Mercy Me, sometimes the hurt and the healer collide. 

Hurt is a fact of life.  The miraculous is the hope we have in God’s ability to take our hurt and use it to mold us into the person he wants us to be.

MercyMe - The Hurt and The Healer (Official Music Video) from mercymemusic on GodTube.