Little Sorrowful

“A ND Jabez was more honorable than his l brethren; and his mother called his name Jabez, saying because I bore him with sorrow.” Through this little passage, as through a lens, we look back and see a sorrow-stricken Hebrew mother, yet pale and weak from chi Id-bear i in g, with a new-come infant in her arms. She puts the mark of her grief on the brow of her boy in the name she gave him. She calls him Jabez, which signifies “sorrowful.” Why, we know not. Whether it was that she brought him into life with no common anguish, and at the peril of her own — or whether the time of his birth was the time of her own widowhood, so that he had no father living to welcome him — or whatever the disaster that darkened her lot, so it was that she put the gloom of her own heart on the name of her darling. She called him Sorrowful, and he kept the name to his djing hour.

Short-sighted mother! While she thought of her child as born in sorrow to bring her new anxieties and cares, while she baptised him in tears, lo! this very object of her grief and solicitude becomes the ornament and glory of her house! He lives to outstrip all his brethren. The prayer recorded of him in the fourth chapter of Chronicles is one of the most beautiful in the whole Bible. God answered it all. His after career was so lofty and so beneficent that people must have wondered how he came to bear so doleful a name. None so happy — none so prosperous — none so honored — as poor Little Sorrowful! His history is like the April shower that begins in clouds and tears, but ends in brilliant sun-bursts, and in rainbows painted on the sky.

Now, we are all of us just as short-sighted as this Hebrew mother who named her boy from her fears and not from her faith, and at last found God better to her than she expected. We persist in naming things sorrows which prove to be blessings in disguise. We often congratulate people on receiving what turns out to be their ruin. We quite as often condole with them over a lot which is fraught to them with blessings above all price. Let us be careful how we condole with those who are under the merciful discipline of a loving God. We may make worse mistakes than was made by the mother of Jabez. Be careful how you condole with a man who has lost his fortune, or has been disappointed in his ambitious schemes. While his purse is becoming empty, his soul may be filling full with God’s grace; while he is walking through the vale of humiliation, he may be getting more of the” herb called hearfs-ease’ into his bosom than he ever knew while on the giddy heights of prosperity. Many a man has been bankrupted into heavenly riches. Be careful how you tell a sick friend that his sickness is an affliction — when it may be sent him to melt his heart, to alarm him into reflection, and to bring him to repentance. Many a man’s sickness has given him an eternal health; and his room of suffering has been the vestibule to Christ’s favor, and to the inheritance of the saints.

Let us be careful, too, in what terms we condole with the weeping mother whose darling child has just found its angel- wings, and flown away to Paradise. If we wish to sorrow for any parent, let it be for her whose living child is debased into an idol, or a frivolous, overdressed toy, or a hard, cunning self-seeker, or a self-indulgent tyrant, who shall yet break the heart of her who bore him. A thousand times over have I pitied more the mother of a living sorrow than I have pitied the mother “of a departed joy. Parents! spare your tears for those whom you have laid down to sleep in their narrow earth-beds, with the now withered rose-bud on their breasts. They are safe; Christ has them in his sinless school, where lessons of celestial wisdom are learned by eyes that never weep. Save your tears for your living children if they are yet living in their sins, untouched by repentance, unfeeling, and unconverted. Those of your family whom God considers dead are those who are yet dead in trespasses and guilt — alive to the world and the devil, but dead to the voice of Christ.

How often do we cover our best blessings with a pall, while we decorate with garlands our temptations or the sources of our saddest sorrows or our spiritual shame! Any one who had looked in upon the old patriarch Jacob on that gloomy evening while he was bewailing the absence of his sons in Egypt, would have heard the querulous complaint, “All these things are against me.” He is rather a Jabez than a Jacob then. Joseph is not; Simeon is not; and they have carried away Benjamin, too, who bore in his boyish face the photograph of the beautiful Rachel, whom he had laid to her sleep by the wayside of Bethlehem. He calls his lot a sad one. But just at the door are the returning caravan who are bringing to him the sacks from Egypt’s granaries, and the joyful invitation to go up and see his long- lost Joseph in Egypt’s imperial palace. His dark hour 13 just before the day. His trial proves his deliverance. God is better to him than his fear. What he baptized a “sorrow” has grown into a mercy too big for words.

There are a hundred lessons to be learned from this brief passage about Jabez and his short-sighted mother; it is a bough that if well shaken will rain down golden fruit. We learn from it not to be frightened by present fears, or io6 Little Sorrowful.

cast down by present troubles. We learn from it that many of life’s best things — yea! the life of heaven-seeking piety itself begins in tears and griefs for sin, in oppositions and sharp-conflicts of the soul. We learn not to lose heart in labors of love for Christ and humanity, because the infant enterprise had to be “brought forth in sorrow” like the Hebrew mother’s son. The very labors that cost us the most anxiety and self-denial and toil, often, like Jabez, “enlarge their borders” and grow into the most honorable and useful of all our undertakings. Never despair of a good work. Never despair of the cause of Right; baptised with tears in its infancy, it has the life of God in its young veins. Never despair of a child. The one you weep the most for at the mercy-seat may fill your heart with the sweetest joys. Never despair of a soul. And never name either your children or your good enterprises “sorrowful” until you know how they are to turn out. and what an All-wise and All-merciful God means to do with them.