Peculiar Sorrows | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 12, 1876

Peculiar Sorrows.

There is no sorrow that is peculiar to any human being. In the myriad experiences of the human family the same scenes of trial, temptation, and affliction, are reenacted from year to year. The unnumbered human hearts, framed and formed in all their deepest sympathies by one creative hand, have in them lines and characteristics of likeness, and the joys and sorrows of any heart may find their counterpart in hundreds of thousands of others. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man.” Reproach, betrayal, bereavement, affliction, desolation, the breaking of tender ties, and the sundering of loving hearts,—all these are but the common sorrows of a world that is filled with pain, and sighing, and tears.

However much we may deem our own condition exceptional and peculiar, or however strange our afflictions may seem to be, when compared with what has occurred in our own narrow circle of observation, yet those same experiences taken up into the broader circle that opens before the Divine mind, may be doubtless paralleled in every point by the experiences of others around us.

But if there were a sorrow or a trial which mortals had never known, yet there is this consolation,—our Master, our leader, our helper, was “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” and was “tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin.” He has passed through this weary pathway, and his footprints, marked with blood, are everywhere before us. We may come to him with tender and confiding love, and tell to him the story of our grief without reserve. He knoweth the way we take; he watches us through every fiery trial; he sits as a refiner of silver, carefully watching that which is so precious to him, until he shall see his own image reflected in the molten mass. May God grant us grace to bear our peculiar trials, and to overcome in the conflicts that are appointed us, that at last, having suffered with Christ, we may reign with him in peace and joy and blessedness forevermore.—Sel.