HH, Sir Godfrey Gregg D.Div                                                                                    [wpedon id=”36898″]

“ He clave the rocks in the wilderness, and gave them drink as out of the great depths.” Psalm 78:15

The Common Joy and Sorrow of Mankind

Again let us think for a moment of God’s ways in providence–in the ordering and discipline of our lives. One of the lessons we learn as we grow older is that our discipline is not exceptional. When we are young our joys are all our own; we never dream that others could have known them. When we are young we take our little sorrows as if there were no such sorrows in the world. And much of the bitterness of childish trial lies in its terrible sense of isolation; in the feeling that in the whole wide world there is no one who has had to suffer just like us. It seems as if God has cut a special channel for us out of which no other life has ever drunk. In joy and grief, in the sunshine and in shadow, we seem to move apart when we are children. But as life advances and our outlook broadens, and we learn the story of the lives around us, then we see that we are not alone but are being made to drink of the great depths.

It is not by exceptional providence’s that we live. It is not by exceptional joys we are enriched. It is not by anything rare or strange or singular that we are fashioned under the hand of God. It is by sorrows that are as old as man, by trials that a thousand hearts have felt, by joys that are common as the wind is common that breathes on the palace and on the poorest street. By these things do we live; by these, we grow; by love and tears, by trials, by work, by death; by the things that link us all into a brotherhood, the things that are common to ten thousand hearts. And it is when we come to recognize that truth and to feel our comradeship within a common discipline, that we say, as the psalmist said of Israel, “He gave us drink as out of the great depths.”

TO BE CONTINUED ……