| The Ministry of Comfort |
Chapter 10 |
Page 5 |
There was a mother who lost by death a lovely daughter. For a long time the mother had been a consistent Christian, but when her child died she refused to be comforted. Her pastor and other Christian friends sought by sympathy to draw her thoughts away from her grief, yet all their effort were vain. She would look at nothing but her sorrow; she spent a portion of nearly every day beside the graves where her dead was buried; she would not listen to no words of consolation; she would not lift an eye toward the heaven into which her child had gone; she went back no more to the sanctuary, where in the days of her joy she had loved to worship; she shut out of her heart every conception of God’s love and kindness and thought of Him only as a powerful Being who had taken her sweet child away from her bosom. Thus dwelling in the darkness of inconsolable grief, the joy of her religion failed her. Hope’s bright visions no longer cheered her, and her heart grew cold and sick with despair. She refused to quit her sorrow and to go on to new joys and toward the glory in which for Christian faith all earths’ lost things wait.
There was another mother who lost a child – one of the rarest and sweetest children God ever sent to this earth. Never was a heart more completely crushed than was the heart of this bereft mother, yet she did not, like the other woman, sit down in the gloom and dwell there; she did not shut out the sunshine and thrust away the blessing of divine comfort. She recognized her Father’s hand in the grief that had fallen so heavily upon her, and bowed in sweet acquiescence to God’s will; she opened her heart to the glorious truth of the immortal life, and was comforted by the simple faith that her child was with Christ. She remembered, too, that she had duties to the living, and turned away from the grave where her little one slept in such security, requiring no more any service of earthly affection, to minister to those who still lived and needed her care and love. The result was that her life grew richer and more beautiful beneath its baptism of sore grief. She came from the deep shadow a lovelier Christian, and her home and the whole community shared the blessing which she had found in her sorrow.
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