Rev. Frank Stringfellow had led a life full of love and service to God. He could ask for no more, yet there was a dream hidden in his heart for one more blessing. His life had been spiritually rich, but the salary of a minister does not provide material wealth. Wealth itself was not his goal, but  he wanted to walk where his Lord and Savior had walked, to see the sites where Christ had preached, and to absorb the power of those Holy shrines. 

His lovely daughters had married well. Two of his daughters and their husbands gave Frank and Emma their dream cruise. In 1907, they joined a tour of ministers to Europe and the Holy Land. This life-changing journey in his sixty-seventh year rejuvenated Rev. Stringfellow’s energy to preach and be a faithful servant of the Lord. He wrote to one of his daughters, “How much of the good done to me can I transmit to others? I have had a great spiritual uplift, with it comes increased responsibility. I hope the light within me may never be put under a bushel, but be put upon the candlestand.” 

And for the next six years he let his light shine brightly. Rev. Stringfellow’s philosophy of life can best be summarized in a letter he wrote his grown daughter encouraging her never to complain, “Serve God and your generation with an unselfish spirit, and the same sun which rose often on you in splendor may follow you in life, and come down in a blaze of glory. We can only do our part faithfully, and the thing which befalls us will be the best thing for us in the two lives which we must all live, the here and the hereafter.”*

 *from the Stringfellow papers at the Virginia Historical Society.