Lessons Learned on the Slopes of the High Places
-Hannah Hurnard
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I think I have come to understand the lesson which the Lord brought me back to Switzerland to learn in a special way. It concerns the great readjustment which I hope and believe is being made in me as he helps me to understand at last the reason why we are born into this fallen world and are entrusted with earthly mortal life. It is that we may learn, in a way which perhaps we could not do in heaven, how to abandon ourselves to loving God, who imagines and creates only the highest possible goodness.
In heaven everyone and everything is lovable, but as the Lord Jesus said, "If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?" (Matt. 5:46). In heaven everyone loves everyone else, and in hell no one loves anyone. But on earth we are in a perfect environment for leaning how to love as God loves to abandon ourselves to loving the apparently unlovely people who remind us that in many ways we are still very unlovely ourselves!
Love is not a feeling. It is an overmastering passion to help and bless and deliver and comfort and strengthen and give joy to others just as the Lord Jesus always did.
Here on earth we have the opportunity to do what the God of love does all the time, and to learn to abandon ourselves to loving, to giving, asking for nothing in return except the joy of so doing. When we really begin to learn and practice that lesson we shall begin to feel "at home" in the eternal world of selfless love.
Here is Les Avants, God has been saying to me over and over again, "It is so happy to love without asking to be loved in return. Dare to be happy!"
It is not some feeling one wants for, nor some special person to evoke the love. It is an attitude of will. I will cast myself down in giving. The lower I go the more love I am able to transmit from God to others, just like the Lord of love himself, who was not content until he found and took the lowest place in the universe.
I spend my days on earth to learn this lesson, so that I may be able to love forever.
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The Geneva Fountain
The day to leave Switzerland came, and I had come down from the high places of the mountains and had to wait a few hours in Geneva. I sat in the Public Gardens beside the lake and looked at the famous Geneva fountain, the symbol of the League of Nations.
At first sight it is wonderfully impressive and spectacular, and the water leaps up to an amazing height and then descends in far-flung spray. But the longer I looked at it, it seemed, somehow, to become strangely unsatisfying. Then, in memory, I stood again beside the precipice at Braunwald and saw the waters leaping over the edge in abandoned giving. And I learned a new lesson.
For the Geneva fountain is exactly the opposite of the Brumback waterfall. The fountain is manmade and strangely useless and artificial. It is like a symbol of unreal, forced love, just as the waterfall on the mountain slopes is the symbol of true love, freely pouring itself down in the ecstasy of giving. The Geneva fountain is forced up and falls down at once to the place from which it was driven upward. As soon as it is no longer forced against its natural inclination, it collapses. Then the same water is used over and over again, performing no useful function except to appear attractive and suggest a delight which is not real and spontaneous-whereas the real waterfall in the mountains is always exultantly giving itself and losing itself and carrying life wherever it goes.
O my Lord, I beg you to make that the wondrous, joyful ideal of my life here on earth, day after day.
Not very nice. 
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