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Daughters of God
Continue this exercise, and let no one dissuade you from it. Use
the limbs God has given you, and look to Him for strength to use them.
You may pray for strength day after day, and yet realize no change until
you exercise the strength you already have. Give the Lord a chance
to do something for you, by beginning the work for yourself. Every
day you will realize a change for the better, notwithstanding you feel
a sense of weariness. Sleep will bring you all right again, and you can
increase your effort, until you, who cannot now walk a few rods from
your boarding place, or from home to church, may walk one mile, and
perhaps two, without injury.
As I have labored to impress upon females the necessity of walking,
some have received my ideas, and determined to carry them out at
once. And [at] the first effort they walked perhaps half a mile, became
exhausted and really suffered so much that they decided that walking
was not best for them. These went to an extreme. They could not bear
so much walking at first without injury. Some are ever disposed to go
to extremes. They can never come up to the mark, and then be content
to stop. They go beyond. They fail to make the best use of the reason
Heaven has granted them.—
The Health Reformer, July 1, 1868
.
Exercise Essential
The following is a portion of a letter written to Edith Andrews,
Niece of J. N. Andrews
.
Attention to health is one of our most important duties. We owe
this to ourselves, to society, and to God. Young men and young women
are proverbially careless in regard to their health. Hundreds die in
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early life, not because of a dispensation of providence, but because of
a dispensation of carelessness. Many girls go half clad in cold weather.
Others choose to sit reading or writing when they should be taking
physical exercise. God gave them organs for use. The living machinery
is not to be allowed to rust from inaction. To keep all the powers of
the body equally taxed will require self-restraint. The lives of many
who have suffered premature death might have been prolonged to old
age had they acted intelligently.
Disease and death have become common because of the unpardon-
able ignorance of those who ought to know better.