Yet the Lord still shewed mercy to me, and helped me; and as he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.

As she narrates the story of the Third Remove, Rowlandson uses these words to refer to her immediate situation. She is wounded and captive, but she has just met Robert Pepper, another captive, who teaches her to use oak leaves to cure her wound. This passage summarizes Rowlandson’s entire time in captivity and also encapsulates the broader Puritan worldview. Here, Rowlandson expresses a belief in the centrality of God’s will: everything that happens, she says, happens for a reason, and both good things and bad occur because God arranges them.