I Know Him by Suffering

AnD so the last months passed before we were to meet. Her cousin was always kind to her. The rest of the world had only one word for her, turned on her always the same hard face. But it grew more and more difficult to guard the boys; and, as they began to understand and ask questions, and the pains of a divided house became more insistent, all the mother-love in her burned in one pure flame of desire that they should have what she had never had, the chance to learn fully of the true and living and holy God and themselves to choose His worship.

But how could it be accomplished?

She gave herself to prayer. Streaming through the busy day, flowing far into the night, not always in words, for such longings as consumed her cannot wait for words: “I am a prayer.”

This could not be wholly unknown to her world, and one day her brother, he to whom so much had been given, taunted her thus:

“Thou to think that thou canst pray! From whom hast thou learned? Thou who canst not read, thou the ignorant who canst not even read the first letter (and he named it mockingly), thou to think that thou canst pray!’’ And he sniffed.

She turned her wistful eyes upon him. He knew so much. If he would only teach her! But far from him was such a thought.

She was only a poor woman, she said humbly to herself; she knew nothing at all. What if this her learned brother said were true? What if it were all a mistake? Sharply then and deep the sword entered into her soul, and that miserable brother thrust it again, twisting it around with malicious intent as his laugh rang down the street.

“Wilt Thou be indeed to me as waters that fail?” Did her heart cry that at this hour?

“I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.”

She had never heard the words, knew nothing of the truth that reinforces our fainting spirits. But wonderful, wonderful are the ways of the Lord. He is here, sometimes revealed to us, sometimes hidden, but always a God at hand and not a God far off. Near at that moment was the Lover of souls.

“Have I been a wilderness unto thee?”

Then with a warm glow of joy she knew what He had been to her all through the bitter years. “You know Him by learning,” she said one day to Star, “but I know Him by suffering.”

It was a true word. She did not mean that Star knew Him by learning only, for Star has suffered too; but her reverent gaze was on Star’s

Bible and many books, and she knew that riches of knowledge lay in wonderful heaps in those rooms which she had never entered. “But I know Him by suffering.” That poignant little word tells all.

No, He had not been a wilderness to her; He had comforted all her waste places; He understood that she had never learned to pray and did not know even the first letter of the Tamil alphabet, so had He not Himself taught her how to speak to Him, even as a mother teaches her little child? And then, as if to reassure her, He came again in another small, gentle act of kindness like that of the midnight meal.