Growing in Imprisonment

‘* Thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress.” Psaum iv. 1.

THE imprisoning experience becomes the minister of strong and healthy growth. When the Psalmist drew near to the unwelcome circumstance its face was filled with gloomy frowns. When it “gat hold” upon him it seemed to cripple and belittle him. It would surely break him all to pieces! But it turned out to be the means of his enlargement. It seemed to shut him in when it was in reality opening him out. The circumstance looked like an instrument of depression, crushing him into the dust, and it was truly a minister of elevation lifting him into larger circles of life. He was enlarged when he was in distress.

There are untold multitudes of people who have shared the Psalmist’s experience. Their life was moving in broad, quiet waters of happy experience, and the glow of contentment filled their hearts from morning until night. And then their life became suddenly contracted, and they were imprisoned in gloomy necessity. Their life had been like a boat, sailing along the free open waters of a canal. The boat passes out of the sunny openness into the deep imprisoning walls of alock. There is a closed gate in front, and a gate is shut behind. The boat is held in the narrowest and gloomiest confinement. But into the locked circle the waters pour from a higher level, and the boat begins to rise in its imprisonment, and soon the forward gate is opened, and the boat moves out on an elevated plane.

And life has its imprisoning locks, God shuts us in. Doors are closed before and behind us, and it is God’s hand which does it. We seem to lose our freedom. We cannot go as we would. We lose the open vision. We lose the inviting vista which stretched before us like a shining hope. And then into our forced seclusion there come the waters of life, and we begin to rise. We may not be conscious that we are rising, but our ignorance does not affect the reality. When God, the merciful Guardian, who watches over Israel, opens the forward gate and restores our freedom, we begin to know what has happened. Life opens out in new and larger reaches. We are on higher planes of being. We have finer powers of discernment. We have a bigger outlook. We have risen in our adversity, and our God has enlarged us in our distress.

T Who has not known people whose sympathies have grown larger in their sorrows? They have begun to think differently. As a sick friend of mine, who had never been sick before, said to me: ‘“‘ My! but things look differently from the horizontal!’’ Yes, indeed! we begin to think differently about many things, and we begin to think about some things which have never crossed our minds before. We become conscious of grim necessities in the world of which we have never dreamed. We had no idea such things were in existence. A whole world of sickly, suffering folk come into sight. Humanity becomes more than an abstraction; it is a kindred, a brotherhood, and we thrill to new relations as we become the children of a new experience. Our sympathies are enlarged, and they are enlarged when we are in distress.

And so it is with the spiritual world. It often grows upon us when we are laid aside and shut within the narrow circle of distress.

We see more of it through our tears. We

are brought low and strange new things emerge. I have heard, that men who look up from the bottom of’a deep pit can see the stars at noon. I do not know about that, but I do know that when men and women are sunk in the pit of adversity and sorrow and look up, stars of promise troop out to bring them cheer. They see wonderful things which once were very far off. And so I begin to see the truth of the old Italian proverb: ‘‘ When God shuts a door He opens a window.”

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