March 6, 2019

If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses?
—Jeremiah 12:5

I do not understand life, but still less can I comprehend how people in trouble and loss can run away from the Christian faith.35 In God’s name, run to what? Have we not lost enough without losing that too? If Christ is right—if there are, hidden from our eyes, wisdom and planning and kindness and love in these dark dispensations—then we can see them through. But if Christ was wrong, and all that is not so; if God set his foot on my home heedlessly, as I might tread on some insect in my path, haven’t I the right to be angry? If Christ was right, and immortality and the dear hopes of which he speaks do really lie ahead, we can manage to make our way to them. But if it is not so, if there is nothing more, how dark the darkness grows! You people in the sunshine may believe the faith, but we in the shadow must believe it. We have nothing else!
[Out of loss and bereavement] already some things have become very clear to me. This to begin, that the faith works, fulfills itself, is real, and that its most audacious promises are true. The glorious assertions of the Scriptures are not mere suppositions and guesses. There is no perhaps about them. These splendid truths are flowers that human hands like ours plucked in the gardens of their actual experience. Why is the prophet so sure that God will comfort all hurt things? How did the psalmist know that those who are broken in their hearts and grieved in their minds, God heals? Because it had happened to them, because in their dark days they had felt his helpfulness and tenderness. And it is true. When we are cast into some fiery furnace we are never alone. “I will not leave you as orphans,” said Christ. There is a presence with us, a comforter, a fortifier, who upholds and brings us through from hour to hour and day to day.
There is a marvelous picture in the National Gallery. Christ hangs on the cross, and at first, that is all one sees. But in the background, gradually there stands out another form, God’s form; other hands support Christ, God’s hands. The presence, the sufficiency, the sympathy of God grow very real, very sure, very wonderful!
—Arthur John Gossip