In the Hands of God

The Hard Things of Life

I. To an Anxious Father

I HAVE thought about your daughter a great deal since you told me about her illness some weeks since. She has been often in my prayers that God would bless her, comfort and strengthen her, and if his will be so, to spare her life longer. You do not say anything about her condition, but I infer from what you write that she is quite feeble. I shall write a little note to her to-day.

Let me thank you, however, for your very cordial words, and assure you of loving sympathy in your time of anxiety. God has led you and your family through valleys of shadow. But I know that he has never once failed to lighten the valleys for you by his own loving presence. Those words in the Twenty-third Psalm, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me,” are applicable not only to the experience of dying, but quite as much to experience of sorrow in life. It has always been a comfort to me to think of that valley as it lay in the mind of the oriental shepherd. You know the reason he often led his sheep through these gloomy defiles. It was not because he wished to make the way hard for them or to give them anxiety and dread. The reason was that somewhere on the other side he knew of a bit of green pasture to which he wished to lead his flock, in which they might lie down and on which they might feed. The only way, or at least the best way, to get to the pasture was to pass through this dark gorge.

The meaning of this in our lives is very beautiful. God does not take us through glooms and shadows to terrify us or to make the burden of the way heavier for us. There are sweet blessings to which he would lead us, but they lie over on the other side and cannot be reached safely but by going through these dark passages. Every time, therefore, the Lord leads us into any dark valley we may be sure that he is taking us to something very sweet and beautiful on the other side. It has been so in your case. When you have passed through these shadowed ways you have always come to new blessings, new joys, new comforts, which have compensated in a measure for the gloom and the shadow.

May God comfort you in this time of your anxiety.

II. To the Sick Daughter

I have had you in my thoughts many times since I learned of your illness. It has been very sweet to speak your name to God in prayer again and again, asking him to bless you, comfort you, strengthen you, to make the way bright and beautiful for you. I am sure that this prayer has been answered. You have been sick through the winter, but you have had Christ very close beside you.

There is a very sweet verse in one of the psalms which says: “Into thine hand I commend my spirit.” Our Lord used these words when he was about to die on the cross — “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.” They are good words, therefore, to use when one is about to leave this world. That is all death is to a Christian — merely breathing the spirit out from the body into the hands of the heavenly Father. There certainly can be nothing to dread in such an experience, and this committal is a very beautiful one indeed. But David, in writing these words, did not think of death, but of life. He commended his life into the hands of God. He could not see what lay before him. He knew not what the experiences of the coming days would be. But he knew that God understood it all and would care for him. So lie committed everything to him. This is what you have been doing with your life all these years. This is what you do every morning when you wake — commit yourself into God’s hands for the little day, with all its experiences, knowing that God will keep you and bless you.

It is very sweet to think of the hands of God. How gentle they are! The gentlest hands sometimes give pain, but the hands of Christ are always infinitely gentle. I remember reading of an Indian child who came in one day from the field with a hurt bird. Showing it to her grandfather, she said: “See! I have a bird. It is mine.” The old man asked her where she got the bird and she told him that she had found it in the wheat field. Its wing had been hurt, and it could not fly. He bade her carry the bird back to the place where she had found it and lay it down on the ground. “It is not your bird,” he said. “It is God’s bird. If you keep it it will die, but if you take it back and leave it in God’s hands it will live. God knows best how to heal a bird’s hurt wing.” I have always thought of this as a beautiful illustration, showing the difference between human hands and God’s hands. Our friends love us and they do all they possibly can for us. But in all the world there are no hands, not even a mother’s, that are so gentle as God’s, or in which our lives are so safe. It is very sweet, therefore, to trust ourselves, with all our pain and weakness and suffering, in the gentle hands of Christ.

These hands are not only gentle, but also strong. They are able to do for you everything you need to have done. These are the hands that have made all things in the universe and which upbear all things. Surely they are strong enough, therefore, to hold you up and to keep you ever in safety.

But I must not write more to you — you are not strong enough, I fear, to read or to hear a long letter. Let me, therefore, assure you of loving interest and of much prayer these days that God may sweetly bless you.