Character Connections ~ Millie Keith

I’m rereading one of my favorite childhood novels. It is called Millie’s Unsettled Season and it’s an adaption based off of several of Martha Finley’s novels. Although Millie’s story is set in the 1830’s, I have always felt a kinship with her. I even remember a childhood prayer where I prayed to “live a life of faith like Millie Keith.”

This first book in the series that I am reading has Millie’s family moving away from the home where Millie grew up to the frontier. Nothing in Pleasant Plains, Indiana is anything like the life Millie knew in Lansdale, Ohio; the place seems empty and barren and definitely devoid of everything familiar and, at first, Millie responds with a temper tantrum.

Sadly, I did the exact same thing four years ago when we moved from everything familiar to me in Greensboro, North Carolina to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I was years removed from having read Millie’s books and rereading now has me wondering if maybe I would have been better off if I’d reread this book as we prepared to move.

One thing that has me especially humbled is the fact that Millie was thirteen in her book. I was eighteen when we moved. You would think I’d have been much more mature than I was.

I’m sorry to think of the pain I probably caused to so many, and I’m sure being so bitter about the move didn’t help me to make any quick friends once we did move.

God has matured and used me in so many ways here in Louisiana that I never would have let Him in North Carolina. (And of course I never would have encountered the same people there that live here!) It is humbling to see how much more God cares about the person I can become -the person He created me to be- and the people He wants me to touch than He does about my personal preferences at any given moment.

I’m so glad that God is so good and so willing to use me and shape my character even when I am so stubborn about it!

“God is more concerned with making us like Him, with making us holy, than with making us happy.”

~Janette Oke

“…be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

~ Romans 12:2

“…until Christ is formed in you.”

~ Galatians 4:19

Do you have a fictional character you feel connected to in a special way?

Have you ever seen in hindsight how the undesirable things that have happened to you were God’s hand at work?

Please share your stories in the comments! I love hearing them. It can be so encouraging to know one is not alone on this pilgrimage of life.

Be blessed, friends. :)

~ToriLynn