Jewels of Suffering I

So many friends climbing rocky paths; so many under hard providences and severe mercies!  We can pray, we must pray, and we naturally long for their circumstances to change.  Sometimes it is agonizing to see a person go through deep waters.  But would we remove from them the calling to this particular suffering—the future grace and the blessing that would otherwise never be?  


And I fear that I’m sometimes derailed by thinking that a particular suffering either has no observable merit, or that the benefit of it has been lost since I’ve brought some aspect of it on myself through some haste, omission, foolishness, or lack of love.  But God knew we would thus, and still He moves inexorably onward in His own intentions and perfect plans.

A definition before continuing with the following excerpt:

Stupid:  insensible; dullness of perception or understanding.  (1828 Webster’s)

 "And there was Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre" (Matt. 27:61)

How strangely stupid is grief. It neither learns nor knows nor wishes to learn or know. When the sorrowing sisters sat over against the door of God's sepulchre, did they see the two thousand years that have passed triumphing away? Did they see any thing but this: "Our Christ is gone!"

Your Christ and my Christ came from their loss; Myriad mourning hearts have had resurrection in the midst of their grief; and yet the sorrowing watchers looked at the seed-form of this result, and saw nothing. What they regarded as the end of life was the very preparation for coronation; for Christ was silent that He might live again in tenfold power.

They saw it not. They mourned, they wept, and went away, and came again, driven by their hearts to the sepulchre. Still it was a sepulchre, unprophetic, voiceless, lusterless.

So with us. Every man sits over against the sepulchre in his garden, in the first instance, and says, "This woe is irremediable. I see no benefit in it. I will take no comfort in it." And yet, right in our deepest and worst mishaps, often, our Christ is lying, waiting for resurrection.

Where our death seems to be, there our Saviour is. Where the end of hope is, there is the brightest beginning of fruition. Where the darkness is thickest, there the bright beaming light that never is set is about to emerge. When the whole experience is consummated, then we find that a garden is not disfigured by a sepulchre. Our joys are made better if there be sorrow in the midst of them. And our sorrows are made bright by the joys that God has planted around about them. The flowers may not be pleasing to us, they may not be such as we are fond of plucking, but they are heart-flowers, love, hope, faith, joy, peace--these are flowers which are planted around about every grave that is sunk in the Christian heart.

 --Lettie Cowman, Streams in the Desert

and my favorite Puritan, Jeremiah Burroughs:

“There is nothing that befalls you but there is a hand of God in it…when a certain passage of providence befalls me, that is one wheel, and it may be that if this wheel were stopped, a thousand other things might come to be stopped by this…when God has ordered a thing for the present to be thus and thus, how do you know how many things depend upon this thing?  God may have some work to do, twenty years hence that depends on this passage of providence that falls out this day or week…is God about to humble me?  Is God about to break my heart, and to bring my heart down to Him?  Let me join with God in this work of His."

--the streets of St. Andrews at nightfall