Honey & Milk (Song 4:11)
Annie Johnson Flint and Her Poems
J. H. Hunter

 

God hath not promised skies always blue,
Flower strewn pathways all our lives through;
God hath not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

But God hath promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.

From a life of pain, but one made beautiful by the presence of Christ, the poem "God Hath Not Promised Skies Always Blue" and others by A. J. Flint have been divinely used to carry blessing and now to needy souls in all parts of the world.

   What is the secret of the popularity of  the poems of Annie Johnson Flint? The question is not hard to answer. It  lies in the fact that here is one who wrote from her heart, who, in pain   and suffering, endured heroically and triumphantly throughout a long  life, wrote, like Milton, "of things unseen by mortal sight", and showed  to the world how God could be glorified in the midst of physical trials  and tribulations that few of us are called upon to bear. It may be, of  course, that, judged by all the strict canons of the poetic principle,  Miss Flint's poems will never qualify for a place in the niche of fame  or rank with the immortals. She did not strive for that. She wrote for  the common people of the world, men and women like you and me who face  life with its burdens and its difficulties, and who try to trace the   rainbow through the rain and to perceive the bow in the cloud. She is  that "simpler" poet of whom Longfellow wrote, whose songs gushed from  her heart and who

   "Through nights devoid of ease,
       Still heard through her soul the music of wonderful
             melodies."

 

It is also true that her songs have  power to "quiet the restless pulse of care". Multitudes of people have  found this to be so. It is of the simple things of life that Miss Flint  writes, and yet the simple things often are the most profound, and these  she expresses by a magic word that enchants the ear, delights the heart  and ministers comfort to the soul buffeted by the perplexities and the  sorrows of life. Miss Flint wrote out of the depths of her own  experience, and lived the realities she proclaimed through her verses. A   few facts regarding her may not be inappropriate here.

 

Miss Flint was born in Vineland, N.J. Her father was born in   Vermont, and her mother was born in Scotland. Her parents died before  she reached the age of six, and she and a younger sister were adopted by  a childless couple who lived until Miss Flint was twenty-three.

 

When Miss Flint was about fourteen the family moved to a town near  Camden, where the young girl had two years in the public schools,   followed by one year in the normal school at Trenton, and three years of   teaching. Then it was that arthritis laid its first touch upon her,   strengthening its grip so rapidly that in less than five years she was  unable to walk. Hearing of cures made at the Sanitarium at Clifton  Springs, New York, she went there, but the disease proved to be too far  advanced for help. However, she found the spiritual atmosphere of the  place so satisfying and stimulating--ministers, missionaries, and  teachers resorted thither in large numbers--that she made Clifton  Springs her home till the time of her death.

 

Miss Flint was nine years old when she discovered that she could put  words together in rhythm and rhyme. Her first poem was descriptive of   frost pictures on the windowpane, and it gave  her a thrill of awe and delight to realize that she possessed the power  of painting in words the beauty of nature. From that time everything  around her went into rhyme--her lessons, school incidents, happenings of  all sorts, both real and imaginary.

 

Her talent, however, seemed to be musical. Before she was twelve  years old she was setting poems to music, and hoped to be a composer and   a concert pianist. This dream was abandoned when she became unable to  play, and she was shut in to the one mode of expression, that of poetry,  which as the years went on became more and more an absorbing occupation  as well as a solace and a delight. But it was long before she ceased to  regard her poems merely as a compensation for the loss of her music, and  came to see in them the work and the ministry to which God was calling  her from the beginning. "Verse-making," she writes, "was so easy and so  pleasant to do that it had never seemed a work or a duty. It appeared so  small a thing that I held it of no importance. I was like the Syrian  general who would not have shrunk from doing some great or difficult   task, but despised the seven dippings in the Jordan."

 

Something of Miss Flint's trials and suffering; are told in Dr.  Bingham's story of her life, "The Making of the Beautiful". For more   than forty years she very literally "endured as seeing Him who is   invisible". The seven volumes of her poems issued by Evangelical   Publishers are bubbling over with the joy of life, and with praise and   thanksgiving for all created things and the love of God made manifest in  this world. There is nothing of self-pity or despondency here, no  moaning over the fate that has been hers, no railing against the Will of  God or questioning of Him Whom she was convinced does all things well. A  great number of Miss Flint's poems were written around God's great  outdoors from which she was shut off almost entirely all her life. But  her radiant faith lent wings to her imagination, and she sang her song   of praise for all things bright and beautiful that had come from the  hand of the Lord she loved. There is an old legend that the nightingale  sings best with its breast against the thorn; and it was so with Miss  Flint, and it is the crucible of suffering in which her verse was born  that imparts to her poems the very fragrance of heaven. It would be hard  to say which of her poems are best. One thinks of such as "God Hath Not  Promised" which has brought such comfort and assurance to a multitude of  souls, or "The Red Sea Place" that has imparted strength and  encouragement in dark and difficult days, or a score of other poems that   have been equally blessed.

 

God hath not promised skies always blue,
Flower strewn pathways all our lives through;
God hath not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

But God hath promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.

God hath not promised we shall not know
Toil and temptation, trouble and woe;
He hath not told us we shall not bear
Many a burden, many a care.

God hath not promised smooth roads and wide,
Swift, easy travel, needing no guide;
Never a mountain rocky and steep,
Never a river turbid and deep.

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