(I read this yesterday and was so blessed that I had to share it! :-) I hope it is a blessing to you as well, even though it may seem a bit long.)
"If we
could see beyond to-day
As God can
see;
If all the
clouds should roll away,
The shadows
flee—
O'er
present griefs we would not fret,
Each sorrow
we would soon forget,
For many
joys are waiting yet
For you and
me.
"If we
could see, if we could know,
We often
say,
But God in
love a veil doth throw
Across our
way;
We cannot
see what lies before,
And so we
cling to him the more.
He leads us
till this life is o'er;
|
T
|
Trust and
obey."
HINGS are not finished
as we see them to-day. Tomorrow they will appear larger, greater. The bud you
see one morning in the garden will be a full blown rose in a little while. The
brown seed you dropped in your window-box will be a beautiful plant by and by.
Wherever there is life there is growth. Every act has its consequences. We
cannot foretell what results shall follow from any choice we may make. We must
always take account of the afterward, whatever it is we are doing, through
whatever experiences we are passing. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews
has a suggestive passage about chastening. He quotes from the Book of Proverbs:
"And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto
children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when
thou art rebuked of him: For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth
every son whom he receiveth." People sometimes chafe when they have
troubles. They fret and blame God. "What have I done," they ask,
" that God is punishing me so? " But God may not be punishing them at
all. Chastening is not punishing. "All chastening seemeth for the present
to be not joyous but grievous; yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit unto
them that have been exercised thereby." The present is hard and painful,
but there will be an "afterward." Chastening now; afterward,
peaceable fruit.
The
figure of pruning is used by our Master. He tells us that every fruitful branch
of the vine the wise husbandman prunes—the fruitful, not the unfruitful,
branch. It is a wonderful comfort to suffering Christians to know that pruning
is therefore really a mark of approval. "Whom the Lord loveth he
chasteneth." There is a purpose also in the pruning. It is not any
reckless trimming— the husbandman knows what he is doing. Pruning seems
destructive. Sometimes it appears as if the whole vine is being cut away. But
there is an afterward—that it may bear more fruit.
One
tells of a visit to a great hot-house, filled with wonderful clusters of
luscious grapes. The owner said, "When my new gardener came, he said he
would have nothing to do with these vines unless he could cut them clear down
to the stock; and he did, and we had no grapes for two years. But this is the
result." Stems and branches cut, bleeding, almost destroyed; afterward, a
marvellous vine bending under its load of fruit. It is only when we learn the
truth about life that we are able to live with faith and courage. Because they
have not learned it, many people fall into despair in the midst of present
disappointments and sufferings. They see only the hard things
in their circumstances,
and pains that make the days almost unbearable, the wrongs and injustices that
are crushing them. They stand right in the midst of all the bitter trials and
see no light, no hope, no comfort. We need to learn to stand away from the
immediate present and get a view of the experience from a remoter distance. We
see only part of the experience while we are in its midst. A visitor to
Amsterdam had heard about the wonderful chimes of St. Nicholas—so the story
runs. He was told that he must hear them, whatever else he might miss in the
old Dutch city. The tourist did not know how best to hear the chimes, so he
went up into the tower of the church to get as close as he could to the bells.
He thought he would thus be best able to get the full benefit of his visit.
There he found a man with great wooden gloves, like hammers, pounding on a
keyboard. All he could hear was the crash of the keys, the harsh clanging and the
deafening noise of the bells above his head. He wondered why his friends had
talked so enthusiastically of the chimes of St. Nicholas. To his ears there was
no music in them, nothing but terrible clatter and clangor. Yet at that very
time there floated over and beyond the city the most entrancing music. Men in
the fields a mile or more away paused in their work to listen. People in their
homes and travellers on the highways were thrilled by the marvellous notes that
fell from the tower. The place to listen to chimes is not close to them, but a distance
away, where the clangor has softened into sweet music.
So it is with the
experiences of life. When we are in their midst we hear only the jarring notes
of pain, the bitter cries of suffering. "All chastening seemeth for the
present to be not joyous but grievous." We are too close to it yet. But
when we get farther away, when the sharpness of the pain is past, when the
hardness is over and forgotten, the music grows sweet. Not until afterward
comes with its comfort, its alleviation, its peaceable fruit, its new blessing,
do we begin to understand the meaning of the discipline of the experience that
was so hard. Afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit.
It is
only afterward that the meaning of many of God's providences can be clearly
read. Now we see through a glass darkly; afterward we shall see face to face.
Now we know in part; afterward we shall know fully. The things we think destructive
and calamitous are blessings yet in their first stage, fruits still green and
bitter, not yet ripened and mellowed.
"Then
be content, poor heart;
God's plans
like lilies pure and white unfold.
We must not
tear the close-shut leaves apart,
Time will
reveal the calyxes of gold.
And if,
through patient toil, we reach the land
Where tired
feet, with sandals loosed, may rest,
When we
shall clearly see and understand,
I know that
we will say,' God knew the best.'"
Life
is a school. All its experiences are lessons. God is educating us. School is
not easy. All true education looks to the building of the finest, noblest character
in the end. It is especially so in God's school, for he is the perfect Teacher.
His purpose is not to give us an easy time at present, but to make something of
us afterward. Sometimes we chafe and fret, saying that God is harsh and severe,
perhaps that he is even unkind. We cannot see that good ever can come out of
the painful discipline. But there are lives which only in the school of
severity can ever reach their best. There are some plants that would die in the
warmth of a conservatory. They must be kept in the cold if they would live and
grow. One of the papers not long since told of a strange plant recently
discovered in northern Siberia. It shoots up out of the ice and frozen ground.
Its leaves grow on the side of the stem toward the north. Each leaf appears to
be covered with little crystals of snow. On the third day the extremities of
the anthers show minute glistening specks like diamonds. These are the seeds.
Is not
this plant an illustration of many Christian lives? God seems to set them in
beds of ice and snow, and yet they grow up out of the wintry cold into fair and
wondrous beauty. We should say that the loveliest lives of earth would be those
that are reared amid the kindliest influences, under summer skies, in the warm
atmosphere of ease and comfort. But the truth is that many of the noblest developments
of Christian character come from the wintry gardens of hardship, struggle, and
sorrow. Trial, therefore, is not something meant to discourage us, to stunt and
dwarf our life and mar its beauty. The snow plant would die in a tropical
garden. There are lives that never could become Christ like and never could
reach heaven without the discipline of hardness. No hardness is too severe
which teaches us to live worthily. " To serve God and love him," says
some one, " is higher and better than happiness, though it be with wounded
feet,
bleeding hands, and
heart loaded with sorrow."
"So
much we miss
If love is
weak; so much we gain
If love is
strong. God thinks no pain
Too sharp
or lasting to ordain
To teach us
this."
We
must guard against the dreading of the cost of life's best things. If we cannot
pay the price we cannot get the blessings. We must have the sharp, biting
winter if we would get, by and by, the genial spring with its bursting
blossoms. We must have the ploughshare cutting through the ground if we would
have the harvest of golden grain. There is no trial in our lives that does not
come to us as the bearer of good. We meet a grievous loss when we are not
profited by the hard or painful experience that comes to us. We cannot see this
to-day. It seems to us in the keenness of our sorrow that nothing which may
come in any afterward will make up for what we are now suffering. But if not in
this life, then somewhere in the great eternal afterward we shall be able to
say: "Now I understand." "All chastening seemeth for the present
grievous; yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit."
Remember
Joseph. He was cruelly wronged by his brothers, torn away from his home, sold
as a slave, maligned and cast into chains—a dark beginning, surely, for a young
man's life. Yet afterward came honor, power, glory. It takes time to work out God's
best things. There is a story of a rabbi who met a child carrying a basket
closely covered. "Tell me, little maid," said the rabbi, " what
you have in that basket." The child answered, " If my mother had
wished that any one should know what is in this basket, she would not have
covered it up." If God had meant us to know all his plans of love for us, he
would not have covered them up under experiences of pain and suffering. We may
be sure, however, that for all our times of chastening and trial there is an
afterward, full of glorious good, waiting for us. We miss a great deal by living
so entirely in the present and not having ourselves to think of the afterward.
We are alarmed when we find ourselves in hard conditions and circumstances,
forgetting altogether that these are only processes through which we must pass
to reach fineness of character, sweetness of spirit, strength, courage,
discipline, and all the qualities which go to make up the best life. We are too
short-sighted when we are in trouble. We see only the suffering, the loss, the struggle,
and think not of the mission of the trouble and what is coming out of it. We should
widen our vision so as to take in the afterward as well as the present hour.
Life
is all one piece. One experience follows another. God always loves us—loves us
just as surely and as tenderly, when all things seem to be against us as he
does when all things seem to be favoring us. When trouble comes, no matter what
its direct and natural cause, it has a mission—it comes to make us better, to
cure us of some fault, to cleanse us of some blot, to make us gentler, to teach
us to be trustful and strong, to make us more thoughtful and more helpful.
Instead of vexing and fretting ourselves with the question how God can truly
love us and yet allow us to suffer, to endure loss, to be treated unjustly and
wrongfully, we would better change our attitude altogether toward our trials
and ask rather what errand this pain or affliction has for us, what it should
teach us, what change it should work in us. There is no trial in our lives
that does not come to us
as the bearer of a blessing. We meet a grievous loss when we are not profited
by any hard or painful experience that comes to us. The other morning one told
of an unhappiness which came from the loss of a friend—not by death, but by the
friend's unfaithfulness. Well, it is hard when one has to lose out of one's
life such a friend, who for years has seemed to be true and whose friendship
has come to mean so much of strength, of companionship, of joy; but there will
be an afterward, and we may be sure that when the afterward has opened its
treasures into the lonely life, it will be seen that God is good and loving in just
what he did. You do not know what poison was hidden in the cup you thought was
filled to the brim with happiness. God took it out of your hand to save you
from a deeper, bitterer sorrow than that which you are now enduring.
You
cannot see this to-day. It seems to you in the keenness of your sorrow that
nothing that may come in afterward will make up for what you have lost. But
trust God with that. The future is long. It stretches away into the eternal
years. If not in this life, then somewhere in the great eternal Afterward you
will be able to say: "Now I understand."
"When
the last day is ended,
And the
nights are through;
When the
last sun is buried
In its grave
of blue;
"When
the stars are snuffed like candles,
And the
seas no longer fret,
When the
winds unlearn their cunning,
And the
storms forget;
"When
the last lip is palsied,
And the
last prayer said,
Love shall
reign immortal
While the
worlds lie dead!”
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