THE DEEP MEANING | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 14, 1881

THE DEEP MEANING.

“I CANNOT let him go. Why, he might be ill; and, among strangers, who would care for him? If he should die away from home, how could I endure it?”

Such were the expressions of a mother who thought she had consecrated her children to the Lord, but who could not consent to the plan for one to go to distant regions to teach the gospel to needy ones. Though himself quite decided on the plan for going, he could not leave his mother while feeling thus, and lingered till at length she gave consent. But she always spoke of him with a sigh, and with eyes brim full of tears, as of one quite lost from the family; though frequent and loving were the letters sent home from this earnest Christian son.

A little more than half the year—which was the limit of his first absence—had slowly rolled away, and there came a new sorrow to this burdened heart. The eldest of the family, a promising young man in active business in the city, came home from his shop one day saying he did not feel quite well and would lie down. In answer to his mother's inquiries, there appeared nothing alarming about his symptoms, and, after a little, she left him for duties in another part of the house, but returned to find him a corpse.

Sympathizing friends tried to comfort her, but from the first she said: “It has a deep meaning to me. He was ill, and I could do nothing for him. He died at home, but I had not so much as a farewell look! I know, I know! it is to teach me that God can keep, or God can take his own. I said with my lips that H—— might go, but my heart never said so till now. From henceforth he may labor where the Lord calls him.”

When the heart feels so strongly the meaning of God's providence shall others dispute it? Shall they not, rather, search their own hearts to see if they be in any “wicked way” of withholding what is God's own?—Congregationalist.