| The Ministry of Comfort |
Chapter 10 |
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There is a way of remembering grief that is not wrong, that is not a mark of insubmission, and that brings rich blessing to thy heart and life; there is a humanizing and fertilizing influence in sorrow which has been rightly accepted and cheerfully borne.
“The memory of things precious keepeth warm the heart that once did hold them.” Recollections of losses, if sweetened by faith, hope, and love, are benedictions to the lives they overshadow. Indeed, they are poor who have never suffered, and have none of sorrow’s marks upon them; they are poorer far who, having suffered, have forgotten their sufferings and bear in their life no beautifying traces of the experiences of pain through which they have passed.
“We turn unblessed from faces fresh with beauty,
Unsoftened yet by fears,
To those whose lines are chased by pain and duty
And know the touch of tears.
“The heart whose chords the gentle hand of sadness
Has touched in minor strain,
Is filled with gracious joys, and knows a gladness
All others seek in vain
“How poor a life where pathos tells no story,
Whose pathways reach no shrine,
Which, free from suffering, misses, too, the glory
Of sympathies divine!”
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