The Providence of Sorrow

“He hnoweth thy walking through this great wilderness.’’’’ — Deut. ii. 7.

Is there, then, a Providence so individual as that? Is there a Divine knowledge extending even to the greatness of my solitude, to the uttermost loneliness of that walk through which I seemed to travel in the valley of death’s shadow. That was of all others the time when I thought myself to be walking alone. The wilderness was very vast and very dreary, and in the midst of its vastness and its dreariness my life appeared to me but as a vapour and vanity. My God seemed to have passed by on the other side, and I cried out from dawn to evening that my way was hid from Him. And yet at that very time it was all known — my wilderness and its vastness and its dreariness. When I thought that my way was hid in the obscurity of a desert, the very steps of my walk through that desert were being marked and numbered. Wherefore should I have ever doubted it 1 Looking back from the conquered land of promise I can see that the wilderness was no accident, no separation from the plan of God. I can see that the hour when I seemed to be most distant from the Fathers eye was just the hour in which He was in closest contact with my soul. My wilderness was my garden; there, unknown to me but not unknown to Him, the seeds were being sown that, in the land of promise, were to become trees of righteousness. There, in what appeared to me the silence and the solitude, the chords of my heart were being strung for richest music, and the pulses of my heart were being quickened for social life — the life of the city of God. It was to me what it was made to my Lord — the middle way between two glories. It separated the glory of my past from the glory of my future. Behind me lay the waters of Jordan, where I saw the opened heavens; before me lay the glorified feast of Cana, where the water of life was to be made wine. And the desert was between; the old was left behind, and the new had not yet. come. Yet the desert was better than the old, and it was leading to the new. It had shut me out from the romance of Jordan that it might teach me how real and earnest was life’s struggle, and in the very reality and earnestness it was preparing me for the city of God. Therefore my walk through the wilderness was a walk with Him. He was leading me all the time by green pastures and quiet waters; the Lord was in that place and I knew it not. Where shall I build my monument of deepest gratitude? Not amid the flowers shall I raise it, not amid the days when the glitter of life was around me, not even amid the hours when the first fervour of a new life burst upon me, but amid the silence and the solitude and the struggle of that wilderness journey, where, for the first time, I felt my nothingness, because, for the first time, I had felt the power of God.