Thinking. Hinds feet on high places

A friend lent me the classic book Hinds Feet on High Places. I remember it from my teenage days when I tried to read what all the adults around me were raving about, but I thought it was boring. Funny how things change. 

Here's a great passage where Much Afraid sees the path before her but it looks too hard. Behind her, her cousin Craven Fear is taunting her and trying to persuade her to come back to him. It's how I've felt often.

Craven Fear starts off.

"Doesn't it give you a lovely feeling Much-Afraid? Just take time to picture it. That's only one of many such broken places on the track, and the higher you go, you dear little fool, the farther you will have to fall. Well, take your choice. Either you must go up there, where you know that you can't, but will end in a mangled heap at the bottom, or you must come back and live with me and be my little slave forever."

And the rocks and the cliffs seemed to echo again with his gloating.

"Much Afraid," siad the two guides, stooping over her and shaking her by the shoulder gently but firmly. "Much Afraid, you know where your help lies. Call for help."

She clung to them and sobbed again. "I am afraid to call," she gasped. "I am so afraid that if I call him, he will tell me that I must go that way, that dreadful, dreadful way, and I can't. It's impossible. I can't face it. Oh, what shall I do? Whatever shall I do?"... "If I call him, shuddered Much Afraid through chattering teeth, "he will tell me to build an altar, and I can't. This time I can't."

I know her fears all too well. Sometimes the path ahead just seems too hard. But there's nowhere else to go.