HH, Sir Godfrey Gregg D.Div

“I will be glad and rejoice in thy mercy: for thou hast considered my trouble; thou hast known my soul in adversities;” Psalm 31:7

One great comfort of assurance in this verse is that such knowledge is always very thorough. When someone has known us in adversities, then he has known us as we really are.

There is a sonnet by Blanco White, familiar to all the lovers of the beautiful, in which he develops the thought that but for the night, we should never know the stars. And so there is a very real sense in which we may say we never know a life till we have seen it in the darkness of adversity. When the sun is warm and all the leaves are green, you can scarcely see the cottage in the forest. But when the storm of winter sweeps the leaves away, then, at last, you see it as it is. It may be stronger than you ever thought, or it may be more battered and decayed, but always the winter shows it as it is.

Indeed, the revealing power of adversity strips the summer covering away. It shows us not in the setting of our circumstance, but as we are in naked reality. And therefore one who has known us in adversities, and been at our side in sorrow and calamity, knows us with an intimacy that probably nothing else can ever give. That is why the knowledge of a doctor is often more searching than that of any friend. That is why the knowledge of a wife often reaches to an unrivalled intimacy, for she has known her husband not only when all was well with him and when the sun was shining on his head, but when his heart was wary and his body sick and all his hopes seemed crumbled into dust.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW …