| J.R. Miller D.D. | Page 3 |
Wherever God’s messenger of sorrow is thus received in a Christian home, with welcome even amid tears and pain, it will leave a blessing of peace, and will make the home sweeter, tenderer, heavenlier. We speak of love as the atmosphere in which the home reaches its best development in the direction of happiness, as in summer warmth the flowers unfold their rarest beauty and sweetest fragrance; but really no home ever attains its highest blessedness and joy, and its fullest richness of life, until in some way sorrow enters its door. Even the home love, like certain autumn fruits, does not ripen into its sweetest tenderness until the frosts of trial have touched it.
When a green log of wood is laid on the andirons, on a winter evening, and the fire begins to play about the log, a wierd, plaintive music comes from the wood. A poet would tell you, that, while the tree stood in the forest, the birds sat amid its branches, and sang there, and that the notes of their songs hid away in the tree. Then he would tell you that the music you now hear from the log as it burns, is this bird-minstrelsy, which has remained imprisoned in the wood until brought out by the hot flames. The poet’s thought is only fancy, but it well illustrates a truth concerning the life of a Christian home, which is worth pondering and remembering.
In the sunny days of joy, the bird-notes of gladness are sung all about us, and sink away into our hearts, and hide there. The lessons, the influences, the tender impressions, the peace, and the beautiful things of quiet, happy, prosperous years, fall upon our lives, as the sunbeams and rain-showers fall upon the fields and the long autumn and winter and early spring, and seem to be lost. There appears but little to show for so much absorption of brightness and blessing. Our lives do not appear to yield the measure of joy they should yield. Then the flames of trial are kindled; and, in the heat of suffering, the long-gathering and long-slumbering music is set free, and flows out.
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