LIFE’S PATHWAY

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20570, 2 June 1941, Page 9

LIFE’S PATHWAY

SOLACE IN PAIN THE WATERS OF HEALING BROKEN-HEARTED PEOPLE Those that are broken in their heart and grieved in their minds He healeth, and their painful wounds He tenderly upbinds. Ps. 147:3. These are difficult days for many people if not for all, and the messages in this column this month have been chosen with a view to bringing confidence, strength and comfort. When Jesus turned to the people one day and, with a voice of infinite tenderness, said, ‘‘Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest, “He very well knew that 1t was healing that men needed. In every community there are sor-sow-laden, storm-driven lives; there are hearts with unutterable prayers for the life or soul of some loved one; there are homes with blanks in them that nothing can fill; there are nameless sorrows that tears can never ease —and so much of this pain seems to us stupid and unnecessary. Certain it is that somewhere in the journey of life, every child of man has to keep tryst with suffering. In such days it. is not argument or intellect that is needed, but comfort; you don't want learning, you want love; you don’t want science, you want faith; you don’t want man, you want God.

And there lies the secret of the whole matter. Dr. McFadyen has strikingly expressed the truth when he says that earth and its tragedies cannot be understood apart from heaven and its purposes. To explain what is below you must remember what is above. Dr. John Brown used to say: “God must have depths of light yet to reveal to account for the shadows here.” And the doctor in the “Butterfly Man” has caught a glimpse of the same radiant truth when he says: “Nothing’s wasted—there’s a forward end to pain, somewhere.” Otherwise life's pathway would be desolate indeed. Healing the Soul And if pain cannot be understood apart from heaven, it is certain that it cannot be healed apart from heaven.' Only the Infinite can heal the soul. To find healing a man must find God. Do you remember Ailie in “Rab and his Friends”? “She looked 60, and had on a mutch, white as snow, with its black ribbon; her silvery smooth hair setting off her dark-grey eyes—eyes such as one sees only twice or thrice in a lifetime—full of suffering, full also of the overcoming of it.’: Doesn’t that grip you? And how did she win through to such a look as that? She was “more than conqueror” as you and I may be—only—through Him that loved us. There is no other way of healing, or of victory.

There are those who try to comfort us by telling us that we will “get over” our sorrow and that time will heal the wound. But in the true Christian sense there is no “getting over” sorrow. There is rather a getting into sorrow, and finding, right at the heart of it, the Man of Sorrows Himself. Helen Keller says, “Our solace in suffering is that the Man of Sorrows is sure to walk that way.” And after all He is the only healing. When John the Beloved begins to speak of the future, he gives us seven great negatives: no more separating sea, no more death, no more sorrow, no more crying, no more pain, no more curse, no more night. And these things can be put behind us one day because of that hill of Calvery. It is from that hill that the waters of healing flow, where a multitude that no man can number have bathed their wounds and have been made perfectly whole. And it is just plain matter of experience that it is not so much the Jesus of Galilee who binds up the broken in heart but the Christ of the Cross. It is at the Cross of the World’s Saviour that life s deepest needs can be met, and the wounds of the broken hearted find healing for evermore.

Generations ago the Lord spoke to His people in their extremity: “When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee. Fiom •‘The Waters of Healing." by the RevW. Bower Black, LL.B —Contributed by the Gisborne Ministers’ Association.