To a Widow
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Dear friend,
I did not know your husband — but it has been a great delight to me to hear so much testimony to his noble character from those who knew him well. This testimony, from varied sources, is wonderfully concurrent — all uniting in painting a picture of him which is wonderfully like the Master's. Knowing him as you did, in all the intimacy of affection, which revealed to you all that was best and truest and manliest in him — you must have a precious legacy of sweet and inspiring memories. Death has a strange power. It shows our loved ones to us at their best, unveiling hitherto concealed beauties, gathering up almost forgotten recollections, bringing out into clearer, fuller vividness, features of tender loveliness, intensifying every line of strength and nobleness in the character, and then fixing in fadeless colors this complete portrait in our very soul, to stay there forever.
Through all the experiences of your future, come what may, this ideal will abide with you and will be an inspiration, a benediction to your life. You can never lose this friend of your youth, this husband of your heart. Always will he be yours. Other friendships can never disturb this one. Other impressions made upon your life by other lives, can never overlay nor dim this picture so sacredly enshrined. His going out of your sight, only gave him to you in intenser reality and more precious closeness and more inseparable union, life with life.
Still the question comes now and ever will come, "Why was he taken away?" All that is now learned from so many sources of his influence as a Christian, of his power over other men, of his activity to do good and to be useful — makes this question the more clamorous for answer. We rest in our faith in God. I have read that the widow of Dr. Livingstone, when she looked upon her husband's body, brought back from Africa, said something like this: "There lies the body of my husband, my dearest earthly friend, my only earthly support; but I cannot forget that there lies also the will of God." And in that will of God, there was infinite love, combined with infinite wisdom. I know you find peace in this same precious faith.
It is not wise for us to try to know why God takes away — God's ways are too high for us. Yet one truth is growing upon me as I go on — that we are not kept in this world so much for the little work we can do here — as much as to be trained for our real life work hereafter, in other spheres. We say, amid our tears, "Just when he seemed ready to become really useful and a blessing, God took him away. How strange!" But is not the reason that the friend's work was not here, that he was only at school, in training, in this present life — and was taken away because he was ready to be really useful and a blessing? "His servants shall serve him: and they shall see his face." Your husband was trained here for the true serving — and then God called him home to give him his work somewhere in his wide, glorious kingdom, somewhere close to himself, under his own eye, where he can look into the Master's face as he serves.
I know you will rejoice, even in your loneliness and sorrow, in the blessedness and joy into which your husband has entered before you. Your work is yet in this world. Your child needs you, and your ministry will be to train this little one for a sweet, beautiful life, and for Heaven. May God strengthen you for this service. And may he comfort your heart in your sorrow. He is most gentle, and his hand binds up and heals — never breaks — the bruised reed.
Commit your life with its broken plans and shattered hopes, into the hands which bear the nail-marks. He will so reshape and readjust it, that nothing shall be lost, no plan fail, no hope wither, so that the crushed flowers may yet grow into fairer, sweeter beauty.
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