SORROW AND TRIAL (2)
SORROW AND TRIAL (2)
Hearing of your deep sorrow I think you will like me to write you a few lines of sympathy. I often feel that if we truly entered into communion with His blood, that is, being identified with His death, no death here would be a surprise to us. The greatest death - Christ’s death - has occurred here. He not only died here,
[p. 428] but He died on my account, which intensifies it immensely.
You never feel sorrow less because you have gone through much of it; nay, the more sorrow you have gone through, the more you feel every fresh sorrow. In our individual history there is no time in which our blessed Lord so peculiarly reveals Himself to us as in sorrow. Sorrow in itself makes one a recluse, but the Lord cannot be shut out, and when I know His sympathy in my sorrow, I am not only more attached to Him, but I am mellowed, I am sensible of a heart with the tenderest love touching my heart, and helping it, when I was ready to admit no one. The fact of finding Him beside me, and how He draws me to Himself, has wrought out in many a one a new era in the kingdom of love, a deeper tie to Him than ever; the very absoluteness of His love in its depths of tenderness has bound me absolutely to Him, and for Him, and I am weaned away from myself and the dark chamber of sorrow, into the bright and holy sense that I am an object of deepest interest to Him, and the very sense of this softens me into the gentleness and hope of a weaned child.
May you be thus blessed, and though you sow in tears you shall reap in joy!