Chapter 46—The Stepmother
Counsel to a Stepmother—Your marriage to one who is a father
of children will prove to be a blessing to you.... You were in danger
of becoming self-centered. You had precious traits of character that
needed to be awakened and exercised.... Through your new relations
you will gain an experience that will teach you how to deal with minds.
By the care of children affection, love, and tenderness are developed.
The responsibilities resting upon you in your family may be a means of
great blessing to you. These children will be to you a precious lesson
book. They will bring you many blessings if you read them aright.
The train of thought awakened by their care will call into exercise
tenderness, love, and sympathy. Although these children are not a part
of your flesh and blood, yet through your marriage to their father, they
have become yours, to be loved, cherished, instructed, and ministered
to by you. Your connection with them will call into exercise thoughts
and plans that will be of genuine benefit to you.... By the experience
that you will gain in your home, you will lose the self-centered ideas
that threatened to mar your work and will change the set plans that
have needed softening and subduing....
You have needed to develop greater tenderness and larger sympa-
thy, that you might come close to those in need of gentle, sympathetic,
loving words. Your children will call out these traits of character and
will help you to develop breadth of mind and judgment. Through
loving association with them, you will learn to be more tender and
sympathetic in your ministry for suffering humanity
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Reproof to a Stepmother Who Lacked Love—You loved your
husband and married him. You knew that when you married him you
covenanted to become a mother to his children. But I saw a lack in you
in this matter. You are sadly deficient. You do not love the children
of your husband, and unless there is an entire change, a thorough
reformation in you and in your manner of government, these precious
1
Letter 329, 1904
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