I am making time to read. I had to find some new books to begin and I found two.
A biography on Charles Spurgeon's wife, Susannah Spurgeon and Carolyn Mahaney's Feminine Appeal. Along with those two I am meditating on Isaiah 40.
Both are outstanding books and I am daily affected by them. Even reading a a page or two stirs my faith so much! I wish I could share every moment the Lord brought clarity and vision to my soul through these two books! It has been very very encouraging.
But I did want to share one thing from Susannah S. 's biography that I think upon daily.
In the book she is suffering from extreme illness and in her diaries she writes,
" At the close of a very dark and gloomy day I lay resting on my couch as the deeper night drew on, and though all was bright within my cozy room, some of the external darkness seemed to have entered into my soul and obscured its spiritual vision. Vainly I tried to see the hand which I knew held mine and guided my fog-enveloped feet along a steep and slippery path of suffering. In sorrow of heart I asked, 'Why does my Lord thus deal with His child? Why does he so often send sharp and bitter pain to visit me?.."
These fretful questions were quickly answered, and though in a strange language, no interpreter was needed save the conscious whisper of my own heart. For a while silence reigned in the little room, broken only by the crackling of an oak log burning on the hearth. Suddenly I heard a sweet, soft sound, a little, clear, musical note, like the tender trill of a robin beneath my window.
..."Surely no bird can be singing out there at this time of night!"
We listened, and again heard the faint plaintive notes, so sweet, so melodious, yet mysterious enough to provoke for a moment our undisguised wonder. Presently my friend exclaimed, "It comes from the log on the fire!". And we soon ascertained that her assertion was correct. The fire was letting loose the imprisoned music from the old oaks' most inmost heart. Perchance he had garnered up this song in the days when all went well with him, when birds twittered merrily on his branches, and the soft sunlight flecked his tender leaves gold: but he had grown hardened; ring after ring of knotty growth had sealed up the long-forgotten melody until the fierce tongues of flames came to consume his callousness and the vehement heat of the fire wrung from him at once a song and sacrifice.
'Oh! Thought I, when the fire of affliction draws songs of praise from us, then indeed are we purified and our God is glorified! Perhaps some of us are like an old oak log- cold, hard and insensible; we should give forth no melodious sounds were it not fo the FIRE which kindles round us, and releases tender notes of trust in HIim, and cheerful compliance with His will. As I mused my soul found sweet comfort in the parable so strangley set forth before me. Singing in the fire! Yes, God helping us if that is the only way to get harmony out of these hard, apathetic hearts, let the furnace be heated seven times hotter than before!"
Is that not so beautiful to behold! What a precious gem of truth!
