THE CROWNING SORROW

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 3, 1877

THE CROWNING SORROW.

A friend recently came to us with the story of a great trial and disappointment.

He is not unacquainted with grief.

Some years ago the crushing weight of a failure in business came upon him, and since then “old debts” with “interest” eating “as doth a canker,” have been burying him deeper and more hopelessly in financial ruin.

Worse than this, years of bitter experience have proven to him the sad truth of all that Solomon has said of “a contentious woman.”

But now comes the crowning sorrow of his life; the very same, alas! that has come to how many others, with its “gall of bitterness.”

He has an only son, his first-born child, in whom, naturally, have centred all a father’s fondest hopes.

Yet in his minority, this son, contrary to his father’s wishes, has married, and into a family of anything but his father’s choice.

However the event may prove, this father’s agony is intense; and all his great expectations for his son are suddenly crushed. With education incomplete, with such social connections, with the mode of life he is compelled now to adopt, he feels that his son must live on a much lower plane, every way, than he had hoped. “Oh! I had so hoped he would make more of himself,” is the bitter cry of this disappointed father.

We were greatly “touched” by his grief, but not having been “tempted” in that “point” we felt we were at best but “a miserable comforter.”

We finally ventured to ask him if he had ever thought that God must often be similarly, but infinitely more, disappointed because his children would not “make more of themselves.” He had never thought of that, he said; and we have to confess that the thought had never come home to us so forcibly before. But we have thought much of it since.

God does want, and justly expects, that all his children shall “make a great deal of themselves,” “for herein is the Father glorified.” What a high standard he places before them! What means to attain it he has given them!

And what incentives to strive for it! His infinite wisdom, love, power, and skill, have been exhausted to provide “ways and means” for them to “make the most of themselves.”

But impatient with the restraints of the “Father’s house,” how many, through their “entangling alliances” with the world, are dragged down to live upon the lowest plane of the Christian life, if by any stretch of charity it can be called Christian life!

Parents, ye whose lives are bound up in those of your children, whose greatest joys and sorrows come from their successes or failures in life, can you forget that you, too, have a “Parent” in Heaven, who is infinitely solicitous about your success or failure, in “making the most of yourselves”? Don’t break his great heart by your failures. He will be satisfied with nothing less than your “perfection,” even as he is “perfect.” If the reward which comes to “success in life,” as men call success, seems so greatly to be desired for your children, what must the reward be which God desires for his children? Let us break every “unequal yoking” with “the world,” with sin in any form, and rise to the higher life in God.—Christian Weekly.