Foreword

It was sometime about the year 1940 that a young minister called at the parsonage in company with a silver-haired, elderly woman whom he introduced as E. Faith Stewart, a missionary, serving God in Cuba. Hers was no ordinary service, since she was absolutely depending on God for means to carry on her mission work from day to day.

As I looked in her face, I knew at once that I was in the presence of an outstanding personality, and in the course of time, I found this to be true. The years went by and we learned more and more of the life and work of this faithful servant of God. Upon being asked that we might present her story to the public in book form, she shrank from the suggestion from innate modesty and the desire to keep her own part of the story in the background. So quite a period of time passed over, and only recently, after a serious illness at the age of seventy-eight years, she at last sent for me to come to her for the purpose of doing this work.

So it was with pleasure that we came to Cuba to write the story of a warrior of the cross, in a day when true and valiant warriors are scarce, and strong, active faith in God for victorious living is apparently at its lowest ebb in the history of the Church.

No one, gathering material from time to time in the study of the life of E. Faith Stewart, could fail to notice a peculiar thing about it—namely, that there has been throughout her life two distinct aspects of service to God, if the one aspect can be so called. As we began to obtain the necessary information, we noticed that at the very first in her early years, she entered into her life work through an experience brought about by physical suffering and an outstanding victory through the healing of her body.

Always frail from her youth, there weaves in and out of the picture deep and serious affliction and ultimate victory through faith in God even in the midst of her most ardent labors on the field. Such dreaded diseases as tuberculosis, blindness, paralysis, and others as serious have come upon her. And even as we write, she, after a marvelous deliverance from a stroke, is already looking to her Great Physician to heal her of a severe attack of kidney stones.

We, who were bearing the load with her and praying for her deliverance, asked: “Why have you taken this affliction when you have just been restored of your recent illness?”

In the long and hard hours of the night, God spoke to her and answered our question in His own way, saying to her quite plainly: “I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.”* (Isaiah 48:10)

And she made answer: “Here I am, Lord, for sacrifice or service.”

But in spite of these sufferings, Faith Stewart has, with the help of God, labored and built up, battling on in faith and a zeal for souls, either raising up a new work, pioneering on almost virgin soil, or entering a burnt-over field, tarrying until strength and health returned to the few that remained and it became alive once more. She labored in Los Angeles, California; Muncie, Indiana; Houston, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; and Indianapolis, Indiana. She pastored also at Anderson, Indiana, as its first regular pastor.

In Cuttack, India, she established a rescue home for little temple girls and pastored a congregation there also. And when over fifty years of age, she went out once more to a new field, learning the language, raising up over thirty congregations, and again establishing a home for destitute boys and girls of Cuba. She was, in this one field, instrumental in bringing over three thousand souls to Christ. During these years she was under no mission board, received no salary, and trusted God from day to day for food, shelter, and all requirements for herself and every worker in the fields.

Humbly, and with a sense of our unworthiness, we venture out in this biography, hoping to reveal that when God finds a truly empty channel, He works as miraculously and faithfully as in the New Testament Church. And if the reading of this book should help in the least to broaden the vision of the reader or to strengthen the little faith that still remains in the Church, we shall feel that truly the work has not been in vain.

—Grace G. Henry