| The Joy of Service |
Chapter 10 |
Page 4 |
No other loss, no bereavement, no possible misfortune, could equal for a moment the loss of faith in God as our Father, and as the hearer of our prayers. A little poem tells the story of a band of pilgrims, sitting one evening beside the sea, each telling of some great loss which he had suffered – one of a ship which went down with all his household, one of a fair face lost in the depths of a great town, one mourning a lost youth, some of vanished gold, others of friends proved untrue.
“But when their tales were done,
There spake among them one,
A stranger, seeming from all sorrow free–
‘Sad losses have ye met,
But mine is heavier yet,
For a believing heart has gone from me.’
“‘Alas!’ these pilgrims said,
‘For the living and the dead,
For fortune’s cruelty, for love’s sore cross,
For the wrecks of land and sea!
But, howe’er it came to thee,
Thine, strangers, is life’s last and heaviest loss.’”
It is indeed true that no other possible loss can so bereave the heart and darken the life as the losing of faith in God. It leaves the world cold and empty. If we were to learn some day that all our Christian faith is but a dream, with no reality, life would lose for us its sweetest joys and holiest hopes.
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