This story of a Scottish shepherd lass growing up on a wild but beautiful, untamed but silent Highland mountain called Donachie typifies all men and women. As Jamie MacLeod (pronounced MacLoud) grows, she begins to look into the distance, scanning the horizon for what life can offer. The only hope she knows of to validate her own existence is to fulfill her father’s dying dream—that somehow she rise from her humble beginnings, the poverty and restrictions of her upbringing, to become a lady, to be someone in the world.
Jamie’s quest is a universal one. We have all climbed to the top of our own mountains, gazed into the distance, and wondered, “What’s out there?” We all long to “make something” of ourselves. Shackled by muddled notions of what constitutes a fulfilled life, our roving eyes scan the horizon for the distant sunrise, for the greener grass on the other side of some ethereal fence.
But the tragic fact is that we often seek the roots of our own identity, our own personhood, outside the one place where true personhood begins.
Equipped for a joyful life of communion with God—with His creativity built into our natures, with His love and goodness surrounding us in the world He made, and with the peace of His Son available to our souls—we yet spend fruitless years looking elsewhere for that which we think will satisfy this deep longing.
Our eyes look “out there” for something which can be found only by turning upward and inward. In vain we pursue the meaningless search for things that can never be, when all the time true life is before us, around us, and within us—life from God himself! We try to make ourselves men and women of stature in the world’s eyes, failing to understand that the only stature of real and eternal value is to grow in wisdom and to find “favor with God.”
He is not as concerned with the horizons of “over there” as He is with nurturing and maturing our characters right where we stand. When we come to the end of the search and grasp at last where it has led us, the question is: are we willing to “lay down our arms” and surrender to the One whose hand has been guiding, urging, encouraging our steps all along? The search is not one which can find an answer in the streets and byways of the world or in a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in Aberdeen. Only in listening to that “still, small voice” of God in our hearts will we discover the fulfillment of our heart’s dream.
This, then, is the tale of Jamie’s quest for ladyhood, a journey leading from the land of her beginnings to the city of dreams, and then back to the source from whence it all had sprung. The lure of adventure and romance tug at her, but in the end Jamie finds true love, the peace of the God of her fathers, and the essence of her own personhood where she least expects it.
This first book in “The Highland Collection” is a story of true personhood as revealed through the eyes of God, not of men. The complete picture of personhood will be seen in this series of books through the three essential ingredients which comprise it: manhood, womanhood, and sonship. Personhood—the relationship of God’s created beings to himself as Creator and to themselves—cannot be grasped one-dimensionally, but only as manhood, womanhood, and sonship are clearly understood in their relationship to their Maker. Book One, Jamie MacLeod: Highland Lass, asks, “What is true womanhood? What does it mean to stand before the God who made me as the complete woman He created me to be?”
As you walk by Jamie’s side, enjoying the mystical beauties of Scotland’s mountains and valleys, look through her eyes as she searches the horizons of life for her own true person. But as she comes to the end of her quest, look through her eyes into your own heart. There you may be surprised to discover, as she did, that the meaning to life for which you have been searching has been in your heart from the very beginning; that for which you have longed has been within reach.
Jamie’s granddaddy read to her from his Book, “Seek and ye shall find. . . . If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him. . . .” By looking too far into the distance, our eyes will be out of focus to see His ever-near presence on our own personal Donachie—right beside us.
The door to being a fulfilled person is inside, not on distant horizons. As Jamie discovers, womanhood before God is the most intimate discovery a woman created in the image of God can make in the quiet of her own heart. For He promises, “Lo, I am with you always.”
Michael Phillips
Judith Pella