Further conversation with John Woolman

We passed on to Manoquacy, Fairfax, Hopewell, and Shanando, and had meetings, some of which were comfortable and edifying.

Just some?  I wonder about the others.

“…comfortable and edifying…”  That’s an interesting phrase.  My meeting is doing some threshing and visioning lately.  We’re trying to find out what manner of gathering we want and are led to be.

There’s often a choice laid in front of us between comfort and challenge.  Do we come to a fellowship to be with those we identify with to be comfortable?  Or do we seek a measure of “spiritual dissonance,” so we can be challenged to grow?  What measure of challenge and dissonance?

….we……made a general visit to the meetings of Friends on the western shore of Maryland……..  We had some hard labor amongst them, endeavoring to discharge our duty honestly as way opened, in the love of truth.

I am guessing that your hard labor may have been to honestly convey the discomforts you had with their reliance on slave labor, but that’s not clear to me.  What were the ways you and Isaac Andrews approached this with slave holding Friends?  Were you called to minister on the subject in meetings?  Or did you just labor with them in private?  Or was your labor within yourselves as you discerned how to relate to the “dark gloominess hanging over” the southern provinces?

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