Tragedy leads people toward God or away from God. For Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874), personal crisis became an impetus for closer union with God. Phoebe was raised in Methodist revivalism when conversion was regarded as a highly emotional experience. It never happened to Phoebe this way. Her conversion was more subdued and gradual. She married Walter, a fellow believer, who sensed God’s call to become a doctor.
Crisis struck early in their home. Their oldest child, Alexander, died at nine months and a second son, Samuel, died at seven weeks. Phoebe was convinced God was punishing her lack of faith. The bottom fell out of their lives when their eleven-month-old daughter Eliza died in a fire accidentally set by a maid.
That was it. Phoebe decided “to lay it all on the altar” and offer herself completely to God. She stopped blaming herself and others for the tragedy and resolved to devote the time she would have given to Eliza to the Lord’s work.
Phoebe became a dominant force in the nineteenth century Holiness movement. She organized with her sister a weekly Tuesday prayer meeting for the “promotion of holiness” in her home, which had to be enlarged to handle the crowd. She and Walter became itinerant evangelists during a time when women took heat for doing so. They started the Five Points Mission in an impoverished neighborhood of New York City, which has served as a model of modern urban ministry.
At age eleven, Phoebe wrote a poem on the flyleaf of her Bible that closed with the words, “Henceforth, I take thee as my future guide. Let not from thee my youthful heart divide. And then, if late or early death be mine, all will be well, since I, O Lord, am thine.” At eleven, I was putting baseball cards in the spokes of my bike to make it sound like a motorcycle.
In 1845, after her daughter Eliza’s death, Phoebe wrote a covenant to God that solidified her resolve to give her entire self to God: