"Touched with the Feeling"
By Clara Edna Rosencrans
HOW often we meet with people who, tho kind and gentle, and filled with sympathy for trials which they can understand, yet have never had experience of utter or partial helplessness, and that weakness and apathy which so often accompany this condition! They look at one with a sort of half pity, and say: "I don't know how you ever live that way. I never was crippled in my life, and I don't know how you feel." Then, again, there are those who never have been sick; and they too pity us, but they can not enter into the feelings of those who are sick and suffering. Their buoyant life and high animal spirits jar upon every quivering nerve, and we can not but draw a sigh of relief when they take themselves off to some more congenial environment. We do not blame them; for if they never felt as we do, never have known what it was to have nerves that the slightest sound thrills to agony, how can they be supposed to understand? Sometimes one feels utterly alone. Then comes the joy of the thought that Jesus knows, that He has felt and suffered all that we can be called upon to endure; for He is "touched with the feeling" of all our pain, not in some by-gone time, outlived and forgotten, but now, at the present moment. He suffers with His own as much as when on the shores of Galilee, in the temple at Jerusalem, or beside the little demoniac. His loving heart broke at sight of the fearful misery Satan had brought upon those who were blood-bought and blood-related to the Son of God. When the pain is greatest and the weariness hardest to bear, we can reach out our weak hands and clasp His, and feel His sympathy and love flow into us in a mighty tide. Ah, He is "touched with the feeling," and we love Him all the better so! He meets one of the deepest needs of our common humanity, that of a living sympathy and help. Then, again, the sufferer is always sensitive. Little slights that would not even be noticed by those in ordinary health, are turned over and over in the tired brain, until they assume entirely unjustified proportions. You worry and fret yourself into a fever over the matter, until suddenly comes the blessed thought, "Jesus had all this to bear, and He knows, and loves me through it all." He had not only the little slights to bear, but the stern sorrow of seeing His most cherished friends turn against Him with aversion and denial. We go a step farther in this wonderful life story wherewith our Lord has identified Himself, making it so much a part of His own that there can never be a separation. We stand beside the grave where we have laid our loved ones, and still we see Him, our Brother, flesh of our flesh, weeping with us, in a sympathy so human that it is divine. And as we realize His oneness with the human race, so more and more shall we become one with His divinity, lifted up to heights to which we might never have climbed unaided. Knowing that "we have not an High Priest which can not be touched with the feeling of our infirmities," gives us an earnest desire to attain to the thing which He would have us to be. His is no far-away, impersonal being, but a living, breathing, loving Friend that our finite minds can lay hold of. In giving us Jesus, God gave us heaven; for where Jesus is, there is heaven. And when we come to feel that tender sympathy for those who are crippled and sick with sin, which He feels, heaven will come so near to us that we will breathe its air and speak its language of unselfish love. And not only will our words and actions proclaim our kinship with that better country, but an impalpable influence will be shed around us, so that those with whom we come in contact will "perceive that virtue has gone out" of us. When shall we attain to this ideal? When shall we come to be "touched with the feeling" of the great world of sin and sorrow and suffering about us, and hasten to bring to it the balm of a living Gospel? What a brother we've found in the Saviour,-
One who never forsakes in our need;
One who feels, through His cross, every sorrow.
O, He's just such a Christ as we need!
He is one with the Father in glory,
Yet He stoops to our lowliest need.
Never wound was too deep for His healing.
O, He's just such a Christ as we need!