Margaret Clarkson: A Treasure of God’s Grace in Suffering

(10 minutes)

Her first words: “my head hurts”

This past Sunday in our church, we sang the hymn, “O Father, You are Sovereign,” written by Margaret Clarkson in 1982. That may not be the most familiar hymn to you, but it is a hidden treasure. (Click here for a recording.)

Not only is it meat-and-potatoes to our souls, but it was written by someone who had come to lean heavily on the sovereignty of God.

Margaret Clarkson was born in Canada in 1915, the year after World War 1 began. In her own words, she was born into “a loveless and unhappy marriage," and her parents divorced when she was 12. From almost her earliest days she was afflicted with physical pain.

The first words she remembered saying were, “My head hurts." She had juvenile arthritis and frequent intense headaches, and this was only the beginning. She would continue to deal with disability, pain, and surgeries throughout her 93 years.

Meeting Jesus in Pilgrim’s Progress

But God had a special place in his church for Margaret. When she was still a young girl, she attended some church meetings about the story of Pilgrim's Progress, the well-known allegory of the Christian life by John Bunyan (1628-1688). Bunyan himself knew suffering — his book was written while he was in prison for preaching the gospel. Without that prison time, he most likely would not have had time or opportunity to write.

Bunyan's suffering produced a book that God used 300 years later to bring young Margaret to salvation.

Disability destroys her dream of missions

Later, Margaret longed to be a missionary, but her health would never allow her to live a life in a remote jungle or in tropical heat. Instead, she became a teacher, and taught in lumber and mining camps in northern Canada. She also spent 38 years teaching elementary school.

Along with teaching, God gifted Margaret as a writer, and she wrote about the things she had learned about God by living with disability. Two of her books on suffering are Destined for Glory: The Meaning of Suffering, and Grace Grows Best in Winter.

The title of that second book comes from the words of another 17th-century Christian named Samuel Rutherford. Like Bunyan, he was persecuted for preaching the gospel and was exiled from his small congregation in Anwoth, Scotland. He is well known for the descriptive imagery that he included in the many pastoral letters he wrote to his far-off congregation.

On December 30, 1636, he wrote to “Lady Culross" about how hard it was to be cut off from his church, and compared that suffering to the cold dark of winter. He said, “I see grace groweth best in winter."

A ray of hope for Joni Eareckson

Suffering Margaret was clearly familiar with suffering Samuel, but she was not the only young woman in the 20th century to live with disability. In July 1967, a 17-year-old girl from Baltimore dove into the water and broke her neck, becoming paralyzed for life.

The joyful Joni Eareckson Tada we know today as a treasure of God's grace has come a long way from the first dark days after her accident. Joni tells some of that story in the brief foreword to the 1985 edition of Grace Grows Best in Winter. She writes,

“It was not long after I left the hospital in 1967 that I fell into a deep pit of depression. I was but a young girl, yet I was facing an overwhelming future — a life of total and severe paralysis. I was in desperate need of answers. . . A young friend who often came by my home for visits stopped by one day with a special book in hand. . .Together we read that book through weeks of winter. . .I eagerly looked forward to each chapter — discovering sense in sovereignty and delighting in a new grasp on God's grace. . . You have in your hands that same special book that I read back in that first winter of my disability. Grace grew then for me. And through grace, you will grow too!”

The sufferings of two Puritans had encouraged Margaret, and what she learned in her own sufferings helped deliver Joni from despair.

Thoughts of creation and of Christ keep her pen busy

In addition to her writings on suffering, Margaret also wrote several books on nature, drawing from her delight in observing God's creatures. Both her Conversations with a Barred Owl and All Nature Sings are celebrations of God's handiwork.

But her legacy has lived the longest in the words of her hymns. When I was a child, our church had a large, week-long missions conference each spring. Every year we sang Margaret's hymn, “So Send I You.” She first wrote this hymn in 1954, and it has a somber tone toward the work of missions. Consider these words:

So send I you — to labor unrewarded,
To serve unpaid, unloved, unsought, unknown,
To bear rebuke, to suffer scorn and scoffing —
So send I you, to toil for Me alone.

So send I you — to bind the bruised and broken,
O’er wand’ring souls to work, to weep, to wake,
To bear the burdens of a world a-weary —
So send I you, to suffer for My sake.

So send I you — to loneliness and longing,
With heart a-hung’ring for the loved and known,
Forsaking home and kindred, friend and dear one —
So send I you, to know My love alone.

So send I you — to leave your life’s ambition,
To die to dear desire, self-will resign,
To labor long, and love where men revile you —
So send I you, to lose your life in Mine.

So send I you — to hearts made hard by hatred,
To eyes made blind because they will not see,
To spend, tho it be blood, to spend and spare not —
So send I you, to taste of Calvary.

“As the Father hath sent Me, So send I you.”

Margaret later realized that these words did not adequately reflect the power of God in the work of missions. A decade later, she had come to see that because of God's power in salvation, missionaries could go out with great confidence. The work would still not be easy, but God's grace would be there to overcome. Consider the confidence that Margaret had learned from her own suffering by the time she sat down in 1963 to rewrite her hymn—

So send I you — by grace made strong to triumph
O’er hosts of hell, o’er darkness, death and sin,
My name to bear and in that name to conquer —
So send I you, My victory to win.

So send I you – to take to souls in bondage
The Word of Truth that sets the captive free
To break the bonds of sin, to loose death’s fetters —
So send I you, to bring the lost to Me.

So send I you — My strength to know in weakness,
My joy in grief, My perfect peace in pain,
To prove My pow’r, My grace, My promised presence —
So send I you, eternal fruit to gain.

So send I you — to bear My cross with patience,
And then one day with joy to lay it down,
To hear My voice, “Well done, My faithful servant —
Come share My throne, My kingdom and My crown!”

“As the Father hath sent Me, so send I you.”

Margaret Clarkson became a living example of the power of God to preserve his people in trials when he chooses not to deliver them from their trials. There is truly a ministry of suffering that is reserved for those those who have been through the flames. We hear their voices more clearly, and through them we see that God can do for us in our lesser trials what he has done for them in their greater ones.

O Father, You Are Sovereign

Next time you have the chance to sing “O Father, You Are Sovereign, the Lord of human pain,” remember a little girl whose life of suffering was used by God to bless a future quadriplegic, and through her, to bless the world.

O Father, you are sovereign in all the worlds you made;
Your mighty Word was spoken and light of life obeyed.
Your voice commands the seasons and bounds the ocean's shore,
Sets stars within their courses and stills the tempest's roar.

O Father, you are sovereign in all affairs of man;
No powers of death or darkness can thwart your perfect plan.
All chance and change transcending, supreme in time and space,
You hold your trusting children secure in your embrace.

O Father, you are sovereign, the Lord of human pain,
Transmuting early sorrows to gold of heav'nly gain.
All evil over ruling, as none but Conq'ror could,
Your love pursues its purpose — our souls' eternal good.

O Father, you are sovereign! We see you dimly now,
But soon before your triumph earth's every knee shall bow.
With this glad hope before us our faith springs up a-new:
Our sovereign Lord and Savior, we trust and worship you.

(Words © 1982 Hope Publishing Company, 380 S Main Pl, Carol Stream, IL 60188)

A note on Margaret’s hymns

In 1987, Hope Publishing Company released A Singing Heart, a collection of Margaret’s hymns. In the introduction, she tells of growing up on the deep theology of the old hymns of the faith. Though out of print, the book can sometimes be found online. You can read the texts of all the hymns at Hope’s website.