Honeymoon dictation? Really Oswald?
While researching the lives of Oswald and Biddy Chambers, I turned up the story of honeymoon dictation more than once.
Oswald and Biddy sailed from Liverpool to North America almost immediately following their May 25, 1910 wedding.
They had a lovely 10-day cruise on the S.S. Coronia across the Atlantic before Oswald began speaking at camp meetings.
Biddy did not travel with him at first. She spent June staying and catching up with her friend Marion Leman Moore in Brooklyn, New York.
Oswald at God’s Bible School
Once he established his bride with her friend, Oswald took off for God’s Bible School in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He’d taught at the school in 1907 and had many friends there.
He brought a suitcase full of homework to grade while at GBS. Oswald taught a Bible correspondence course that summer.
Indeed, Chambers biographer David McCasland estimated he read and graded 4000 student’s papers between June and August!
(How many people do you know graded papers on their honeymoon?)
Honeymoon dictation in the Catskills
At some point that August, a friend sent them to “Meadow Lawn,” a hotel in the Plaaterkill Valley, southwest of Poughkeepsie for a week.
The two nature-lovers hiked the hills and dales–much like Oswald’s beloved Yorkshire mountains.
They loitered beside splashing streams. Oswald may have had an opportunity to fish!
Of that week, Biddy wrote:
We spent a little while in the exceedingly grand and beautiful Catskill Mountains, amidst scenery which left us with the sense of worship expressed by Isaiah, ‘The whole earth is full of His glory.'”
The Place of Helps
Oswald Chambers was a romantic man.
He loved poetry, particularly that of Robert Browning.
He had not expected God to provide a wife.
Throughout their short seven years of marriage, he wrote romantic letters and sent poetry to his wife.
Would he really have spent his few scant days on honeymoon dictation?
Yes, but it wasn’t an entire book.
A pamphlet is perhaps a better description of the four pages.
A New Ministry
McCasland noted The Place of Help is based on Psalm 121, “I will lift mine eyes to the hills. Whence should my help come? My help cometh from the Lord.”
It marked the beginning of a new ministry that occurred to Oswald shortly after falling in love with Biddy.
In one letter to her, he wrote
I want us to write and preach; if I could talk to you and you shorthand it down and then type it, what ground we would get over? I wonder if it kindles you as it does me!”
Mrs. Oswald Chambers, p 37
Biddy saw her dictation as a way of advancing Oswald’s ministry beyond the students to whom we spoke.
That day in 1910, she heard his thoughts in a beautiful place that reflected the Scripture passage.
She never forgot it.
The rest of the Honeymoon
“Mr. Romance” escorted his bride to camp meetings up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States for the rest of the summer.
He continued marking papers.
He introduced her to camp meeting folk:
“They are not the clever, the glittering or the worldly, but just the common folk who have gone through much uncommon sacrifice to belong to God.
“I am sure you will find some royal, heroic souls.”
Abandoned to God p. 177
Biddy traveled with him to camp meetings in Ohio, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Maine.
She corresponded for the rest of her life with several persons.
One of them was Lettie Cowman, who eventually wrote the devotional Streams in the Desert.
In later years, Biddy admired Lettie’s devotional and donated money through the sales of books to Lettie’s ministry, The Oriental Missionary Society.
The honeymoon dictation’s legacy
Following Oswald’s 1917 death in Egypt, his close friend Jimmy Hanson suggested printing pamphlets of his teaching.
Biddy made arrangements and freely gave away copies of The Place of Help to WWI soldiers.
She lacked Oswald, but Biddy continued his ministry.
Ultimately, her transcriptions of his talks resulted in 30 books; the most famous was 1927’s My Utmost for His Highest.
Here’s a Revived Thoughts podcast, featuring Pastor Chase Replogle reading The Place of Helps as a sermon Oswald may have delivered.
Tweetables
Oswald Chambers on his honeymoon. Why not dictate a book? Click to Tweet
Romance & ministry: Oswald Chambers’ honeymoon. Click to Tweet
What the Chambers lived and did continues to amaze. Where this journey continues to lead you, as you uncover and discover it’s richness, also amazes. Fascinating and humbling. Thank you, Michelle.