A Blossom in the Desert

by Miriam Huffman Rockness

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 seasons of her life, Lilias recorded in watercolors and words her observations filtered through her heavenly