Precious Things Put Forth by the Moon

‘ God who has the almighty power sleeps. The Lord Bishop and the Committee have shut up their eyes. The Executive members have lost their consciousness. The Church of Christ at Middletown is daily falling down dead.’

This candid paragraph concerning a place in the South is from a letter received by the Bishop of Madras in 1893. Lest things should be thus, when converts began to come out in connection with Ragland’s work, and also for the sake of the often relapsed Christians who were to be found scattered on the Plain, and whom the band had influenced for good, the C.M.S. sent out a fine man, C. Every, and they welcomed him with thanksgiving.

Immediately, and how well a missionary will understand what this meant to them. Every had to be taken for another need, and when at last he was retrieved they were jubilant, for he was getting Tamil well, and had just reached the place where it is possible really, not merely nominally, to lift burdens — ‘ likely to be a very great help and comfort to us,’ wrote Ragland with a thankful heart. Eleven months later cholera smote him. Once again, as when Fenn went down with typhus, Ragland was alone, and he had never nursed cholera. Swiftly the hill of death came on. Ragland wrapped him in his railway rug, but nothing could help him. Wrapped in that rug he was laid to sleep by the little house then being built where they had hoped to spend the approaching wet season together.

‘ What a bright holy course he has run, never trifling. The Lord seems to take the best first.’ Aye, and test to the uttermost those He leaves behind. But help came, another was found to fill the gap, another of choice spirit, Barenbrock. Seven months later he too fell, struck down by that same cholera. And, as they dug his grave by Every ’s, it seemed as if before the next sun set they would have to dig one by his side for Fenn.

‘ My thoughts are not your thoughts.’ O Lord, would that they were! Have we never all but said it, cried it back to Him? But no, before the words have cooled in the air we recall them; not ours, because better, very far better. ‘ For My thoughts are higher than your thoughts who has not felt his thoughts, as if they had hands to hold, ding to the dear things low on the earth? ‘ I know the thoughts that I think towards you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil to give you an expected end.’ Dropping, dropping through the silence fall the words upon our hearts, and surely at such times there are those about us whom we do not see. Do they long to break through for one moment, be visible, explain? Do they watch us breathlessly, I wonder, as we sometimes watch a little hard-pressed child? Will it trust or will it not? ‘ What I do thou knowest not now;

but thou shalt know hereafter.’

Therefore let the Lord’s tried ones, to whom this tale may come, be of good courage. Blow may follow blow on the anvil of life, wave may chase wave upon its shores, Ichabod may be written, or appear to be written, across every hope, every purpose of the heart, even as for Ragland it was written again and again as the glory faded from his sky; pile simile on simile, how little such can say: are we not as water spilt on the ground which cannot be gathered up again? No, verily, it is not so. There is no waste in God’s economy. This and no other is our faith. Let us hold it fast not only in moments of spiritual exultation when faith rises likes a lark in the clear air and sings, but through all the common days of life when feelings die down, and everything looks hopeless and impossible.

Yes, there are the precious things brought forth by the sun, and happy are those who have such to offer; but blessed be God, too, for the precious things put forth by the moon, and for the chief things of the ancient mountains, and for the precious things of the lasting hills. Such are the treasures of darkness, jewels dug from out deep mines, the precious things of pain. God never wastes His children’s pain.