Lettie Burd Cowman Began "Streams in the Desert" to Encourage Herself
The Cowmans as a missionary couple. Lettie gathered inspirational material to help her cope with Charles’ illness.
LETTIE COWMAN faced an incredible trial when her husband, Charles, grew very sick and began to die slowly. Instead of despairing, however, Cowman compiled a year’s worth of readings, poems, and Bible texts to encourage herself as she cared for her dying husband. She penned a few observations relating the theme of each day’s excerpt to her walk with God.
When her friends heard of the project, they requested copies, and so she printed a few in 1924. That was the end of that, she thought. Instead, demand grew. By 2006, Streams in the Desert had sold six million copies and had been translated into at least fifteen languages, probably the most popular daily devotional ever written, comparable in sales to Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest.
Born Lettie Burd in Afton, Iowa on this day, 3 March 1870, she became the childhood sweetheart of Charles Cowman. When they married in 1889, he was a manager of a Western Union telegraph office in Chicago, but left the work to live in Colorado. The altitude made Lettie sick and the pair soon returned to Chicago.
Attending Moody Church, they heard A.B. Simpson preach. Simpson was the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and as he preached, his appeal moved them to give sacrificially for missions. On August 11 1900, Charles received a distinct impression that he was called to work as a missionary in Japan. The Cowmans, Juji Nakada, and Ernest Kilbourne founded the Oriental Missionary Society.
Early work focused on education and evangelization meetings at which Nakada was the speaker. Between 1912 and 1918, OMS sent bands of Christians to visit every home in Japan, distributing Bibles and Christian literature. The work was made possible through the consultation of military maps that the Japanese government had surprisingly made public.
By the time Japan’s sixty million people had been reached in this “Every Creature Crusade,” Charles’ health was in serious decline. His illness forced the Cowmans to return to the United States, where Lettie began compiling Streams in the Desert.
Before her death, she compiled five other devotional books, wrote a biography of her husband, and headed OMS between 1928 and 1949. During her years at the helm, she made strenuous efforts to extend the Every Creature Crusade to the entire world, despite her increasing age. She died in 1960.
—Dan Graves
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Each person copes with loss differently. Through a Lens Darkly: Grief, Loss and C.S. Lewis. Watch at RedeemTV
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