There is no other loss, in all the range of possible losses that is so great as the breaking of our communion with God. I know that this is not the ordinary estimate. We speak with heavy hearts of our earthly sorrows. When bereavements come and our homes are emptied and our tender joys are borne away, we think there is no grief like ours. Our lives are darkened and very dreary does this earth appear to us as we walk its paths in loneliness. The shadow that hangs about us darkens all the world.
There are other losses – losses of friends by alienation or misunderstanding; losses of property, of comforts, of health, of reputation; the shattering of beautiful and brilliant hopes, but there is not one of these that are such a calamity as the loss of God’s smile or the interruption of fellowship with him.
Men sigh over those misfortunes which touch only their earthly circumstances, but forget that the worst of all misfortunes is the decay of spirituality in their hearts. It would be well if all of us understood this. There are earthly misfortunes under which hearts remain all the while warm and tender, like the flower roots beneath the winter’s snows, ready to burst into glorious bloom when the glad springtime comes. Then there are worldly prosperities under which spiritual life withers and dies. Adversity is ofttimes the richest of blessings. But the loss of God’s smile is always the sorest of calamities.
We do not know what God is to us until we lose the sense of his presence and the consciousness of his love.
This is true, indeed, of all blessings. We do not know their value to us until they are imperiled or lost. We do not prize health till it is shattered and we begin to realize that we can never have it restored again. We do not recognize the richness of youth until it has fled, with all its glorious opportunities, and worlds cannot buy it back. We do not appreciate the comforts and blessings of Providence till we have been deprived of them and are driven out of warm homes into the cold paths of a dreary world. We do not estimate the value of our facilities for education and improvement till the period of these opportunities is gone and we must enter the battle of life imperfectly equipped. We do not know how much our friends are to us till they lie before us silent and cold. Ofttimes the empty place or the deep loneliness abut us is the first revealer of the worth of one we failed duly to prize while by our side.
Page 1