The End Will Be Glorious

Comfort for the Bereaved

It is impossible to follow out all the windings of experiences and circumstances in trying to apply God’s promise regarding prayer. I shall not attempt to go into the question which we talked about so fully the other day. I only wish in a few lines to impress the one point — that you trust absolutely in God’s goodness, love, grace, wisdom and power, and commit to his hands and for his working out all the questions and perplexities and uncertainties which have made the burden of these weeks so heavy for you. There is not the least shadow of doubt that ultimate and perfect good will come out of the experiences through which you have been passing during the last months. You had your dreams for your child, and they were beautiful dreams. We begin dreaming dreams for our children before they are born. When they come into our hand we continue dreaming dreams, making plans for them, cherishing hopes, looking forward to the great thing-s we expect them to reach. I know well what this means in every father’s and mother’s heart. Then comes, as in your case, the cutting off of the earthly life of the child, and it seems to us in the first shock of our disappointment that all is gone, that all the dreams have failed, that all the expectations and hopes have withered. This would be true if life ended with what we call death. But the fact is, that death is not the end but the beginning of everything beautiful. Your child passed through the gate and out of your sight, but her life is going on just as really, and far more fully and beautifully and richly beyond the gate.

Of the dreams which you have been dreaming all along, not one has faded or failed you. Every one of them is being realized in that sweeter summer, in that more beautiful home on the other side. Immortality gives us a field in which everything we have thought about and looked for will have abundant time to ripen and develop. I like the phrase in the New Testament, “The power of an endless life.” The words are wonderfully suggestive. The thought of the endless life gives meaning to all that is beautiful and good in life that seems so short to us on this side. You will think of this — will you not? The short years which were lived here by your beloved one were just the beginnings of the endless years. There will be time in this immortality for the development of everything beautiful to its richest and fullest. Love means far more when we think of its going on forever. Think what your influences and teaching have meant to your child in view of the endlessness of the life into which she has entered.

I know how your heart keeps asking why’s, even in your strongest faith, in the midst of your trust. We do not know why. But it is a great comfort to be able to trust and to be sure that somehow it is all right. Your son did not die too soon. He finished his life according to God’s plan for it. You remember that Jesus lived only thirty-three years and then said, “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” Do not think of George’s life as only a fragment, an unfinished life. It was complete as God saw it. Remember he is living yet; he is going on with his work in the other world.

It seems to me that there is wonderful comfort in this for your heart as you think of the unfinished things he left. A friend of mine, a young man, left a letter halfway written on his desk, his pen stopping at the middle of a word. He never came back to finish it. It seemed to me a beautiful picture of all life when we leave this world. It is just a great mesh of half -finished things, as we drop it, because in death we only go on to take up the next day in the other world what we were doing here. We will begin next morning just where we left off here when God calls us away. God is m all of it, and the end will be glorious when we come to the other side.