Ruth Myers - 31 Days of Encouragement As We Grow Older

31 Days of Encouragement as We Grow Older represents the final book project by a beloved author and joy-filled missionary and teacher. On November 8, 2010, at age eighty-two, Ruth Myers passed from this world into the eternal presence of the One whose praises were the overriding theme of all she said and wrote.

To everyone who knew her countless friends across Asia and America and elsewhere Gods personal love for Ruth was clearly her deepest delight, and she was eager to honor and thank Him for it, even while continually recognizing her need to understand and experience this love more deeply.

The essence of how she perceived His love was reflected in the title of a partly autobiographical work she penned in 1998: The Perfect Love: Intensely Personal, Overflowing, Never Ending In that books opening pages, she quoted a poem by Hudson Taylor that had become for her a frequent prayer:

Lord Jesus, make Thyself to me
a living bright reality
more dear, more intimately nigh
than even the sweetest earthly tie.

Unmistakably, her request was granted. To all those around her it was obvious that the Lord was near and dear to her as the brightest, most vibrant reality in her experience. Her sweet enthusiasm for Him was contagious; to be around Ruth any length of time meant that one couldnt help sensing the Lords closeness and kindness. And at her final departure from this life, though family and friends were grieved, their loss was lightened by the sure knowledge that Ruth is at home with the One whose shining aliveness is now awesomely, unfadingly, indescribably real to her forever.

In The Perfect Love, Ruth also highlighted a favorite quote from A. W. Tozers The Pursuit of God:

God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful, that He can without anything other than Himself meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.

These are words Ive returned to again and again, she wrote, for Ive found them true. Down through the years, in a countless variety of circumstances in every season of life, God has proven to me that He can more than satisfy my heart as I let Him. Her discovery of this truth was hastened by tragic hardship. On the mission field in Asia, a nine-month battle with cancer took the life of her first husband, Dean Denler, at age thirty-two, leaving Ruth behind as a single mother of two young children. It would be eight years before she remarried (to Warren Myers, with whom she would serve as a missionary partner and coauthor for thirty-three years in marriage before his death in 2001). Ruth spoke candidly in The Perfect Love of her struggles in her years as a widow, revealing a remarkable gift of seeing present difficulties in a longer light.

By Gods grace, it was this long-term perspective that made her determined, in her more mature years, to continue growing personally in the Lord as well as reaching out to others. In the final pages of The Perfect Love, in a section on our need for continual submission to the Lord, she had quoted Jim Elliot: That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime. She believed lifes later years are meant to be just as spiritually vibrant and rewarding as earlier seasons. She recognized the danger of drifting over time into lethargy spiritual and otherwise. She wanted not only to avoid this herself but also to help others avoid it by preparing themselves long before.

Her many notes and reflections and prayers on this subject are gathered and arranged for you in the pages that follow. For you, and for many others, may these words serve to prolong and amplify Ruths ministry of encouragement, for which the Lord so skillfully gifted her. Day by day, year by year, season by season, may these truths from the Lord lead you always deeper and farther and higher into the Lords blessings, as they did for Ruth.