March 7, 2019
If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses?
—Jeremiah 12:5
[Out of loss and bereavement, some things have become clear.]36
One becomes certain about immortality. You think that you believe in that. But wait till you have lowered your dearest into an open grave, and you will know what believing it means.
We Christian people are unchristian in our thoughts of death. We keep thinking of what it means to us, and that is all wrong!
In the New Testament, you hear very little of the families with that aching gap but a great deal about the saints in glory. And that is where our thoughts should dwell. Dare you compare the clumsy nothings our poor blundering love can give them here with what they must have yonder, where Christ himself has met them and has heaped on them, who can fathom, what happiness and glory?
In any case, are we to let our dearest be wrenched away by force? Or, seeing that it has to be, will we give them willingly and proudly, telling God that we prefer our loneliness rather than that they should miss one tittle of their rights? When the blow fell, that was the one thought that beat like a hammer in my brain. I felt I had lost her forever, that to all eternity she must shine far ahead of me, and my heart kept crying out, “I choose it, I choose it, do not for my sake deny her anything.” I know, now, that I have not lost her. For love is not a thing one leaves behind. When we are young, heaven is vague. But as our friends gather there, it gains vividness and homeliness. And when our dearest have passed yonder, how real it grows, how near: Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. It is not far. They are quite near. The communion of the saints is a tremendous and most blessed fact.
You need not be afraid of life. Our hearts are very frail, and there are places where the road is steep and lonely. But we have a wonderful God. And as Paul puts it in Romans 8:38–39, what can separate us from his love? Not death, he says immediately, pushing that aside at once as the most obvious impossibility.
No, not death, for standing in the roaring Jordan, cold to the heart with its dreadful chill and conscious of its terror, I, too, like Hopeful, can call back to you who one day will have to cross it, “Be of good cheer for I feel the bottom, and it is sound.”
—Arthur John Gossip
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