Adam's Predicament

Writing tenderly about Adam in the Garden of Eden before Eve was formed, Adolphe Monod, French preacher in the early 1800's, wrote:

"Gifted with  a nature that is too communicative to be self-sufficient, he cries out for a companion, a support, a complement, and he is only half alive as long as he lives alone.  Made to think, to speak, to love, his thought seeks another thought to sharpen it and it reveal it to itself; his word is sadly lost in the air or awakens only an echo that mutilates it instead of responding to it; his love does not know what to do with itself and, falling back on itself, threatens to turn into distressing egotism.  In the end, his entire being longs for another self."

...the lowest state to which a woman's mind can fall."

In A Bride Goes West Nannie Alderson, living in incredibly primitive conditions on the frontier, catches herself one day: "I saw that I was beginning to feel sorry for myself -- the lowest state to which a woman's mind can fall....I still think it is the most important lesson that any wife can learn, whether she lives in a house of cottonwood logs or in a palace."
Lord, forgive my pathetic self-pity.  I have not because I ask not.  And where I have asked and asked, and not received, give grace to bow content beneath your wise, fatherly disposing.

"...our other house was building."

In A Bride Goes West Nannie T. Alderson, a true frontier woman, talks about her first very rough home out west: "We didn't mind the hard things because we didn't expect them to last....Our little dirt-roofed shack didn't matter because our other house was building....We didn't expect to live on a ranch all our lives --oh, my no!"
Oh, Lord, help me not to mind the hard things.   You said, as you prepared to go, that you are building a mansion for your brothers and sisters.  I don't expect to be here long.