In 1888, Lilias Trotter, daughter of a distinguished Victorian family, left her comfortable upper-class lifestyle in London to venture into the Arab world of Algeria and Northern Africa, where she spent the rest of her life living out the life and light and love of Jesus Christ to those around her. Lilias viewed the world with "heartsight as deep as eyesight," and her artistic talent took both visual and verbal form as she documented in words and sketches the seasons of her forty years in Algeria.

The exquisite paintings and deeply inspirational writings in A Blossom in the Desert are drawn from the extensive body of work Lilias Trotter left: devotional books and leaflets, journals and letters, and thirty astonishingly beautiful page-a-day diaries. Lilias believed God has two textbooks--Scripture and Creation--and she studied both. Day by day, decade upon decade, through the season of her life, Lilias recorded in watercolors and words her observations filtered through her heavenly vision: God working out His purposes on a land and in a people.

"Lilias painted and wrote in obscurity with no concern for fame or recognition. Yet there is no doubt that she would welcome the reader to 'come and look' at her writings and watercolors--with 'heartsight' as well as 'eyesight.' A Blossom in the Desert introduces to you the vision--visible and invisible--of the remarkable Lilias Trotter! Come. Look. See!" --From the Introduction by Miriam Huffman Rockness

Sample Quotations

"The word of the Lord" has come these mornings with the stealing, day by day, of a tiny circle of light across the wall as soon as the sun is up. It comes through a wee chink in the weatherworn shutter--just one shaft--but it is the image of the Sun Himself, full-orbed. And it has come with a flood of joy that no matter if we are only crooked little chinks, the heavenly Sun can send through us not only light, but the revelation of His Image: "the light of the knowledge of the Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ!"

Take the very hardest thing in your life--the place of difficulty, outward or inward, and expect God to triumph gloriously in that very spot. Just there He can bring your soul into blossom!

The same lesson is reiterated all round by God: the simple ABC lesson that inadequacy and inefficiency on the human side are His conditions for working. "He sealeth up the hand of every man, that all men may know His work."