THE VOICES WE UNDERSTAND
Even child life is full of tragedy. In their helplessness they stand in the way of advancing events, a mother or a father taken away while yet they need their helping hand, and often the mother is stricken down while the child has no other means of existence but the milk that flowed from the maternal breast of the dead woman. If this is by design, who can justify the designer while looking through the orphan’s tears? No, the designer of all these heartaches and sorrows does not ask to be justified by those who suffer most. The same God who created conditions that give pain to his creatures, also gave the suffering creature voice to protest and cry out against the treatment they receive. Tears and sobs are also a protest against the pangs of sorrow and pain.
Yes, tragedy is forced into each life at the hour of birth. Show me a child a year old, and I can write of its history in a way to bring tears to your eyes, and to my own. Its little tiny wail at the hour of birth is a protest against the pains of the world, and only when it sleeps does instinct cease to cry out for mercy and assistance. For this is a cruel world to be born into. Nature has provided a thousand sources of torture to direct the child mind into choosing the proper way through life. God does not temper the hot stove to the tender hand of a child, and when one falls into the fire Nature does not halt to pull it out and pour a soothing balm upon the blisters. No, Nature moves on as unrelentingly as the cogs of two great wheels in a mill crushing all that falls between the meshing cogs.
I know an orphan boy who was one of several children when his mother died, and was sent from the western home to the grandparents in the East. They were kind to him and did all they could to make him happy, but often in the silent hours of the night, they could hear him sobbing and crying as though his little heart were breaking. They were the sobs of a homesick child, for when they would ask him why he was crying so bitterly, he would say: “Oh, I fear I will never see my little brothers nor my papa again. They are so far away, and I am so small, and they will forget me.”
Something had gone out of his life when his mother died which no human love could replace. He lost something that would never, never be found and restored to the child; and in my blind way I can never reconcile the death of a loving mother with the work of a loving God. Does he love to hear the bitter cries and heart-broken sobs of a homesick child?
Who knows how much influence these bitter cries have over the designs of the great Creator? If God listens to prayer, is he deaf to the sobbing cries of a homesick orphan? Is not the pathetic music sweeter than all other strains of harmonious sound? Perhaps God loves the pathetic and the heart-cries of children far better than the coarser songs of the full-grown people.
We do not know, but there must be some reason for all these sad causes and effects. The child outgrows its many distresses, and the orphan soon lives down its sorrows, and happiness blooms in the ashes of child memories. A loving God would not send all these afflictions for sport. They all mean something in the universal design. Perhaps to soften older hearts and to water the tender plant of love with a child’s tears.
These sobs and tears may be necessary as the sunshine and showers of rain, else why do they exist? It may be as impossible to run this old sphere without human sorrow and heartaches as it is to run a living world without an atmosphere and clouds. Who knows that the clouds do not suffer afflictions when they pour out their raindrops, or the wind feel pain and heartache when it wails at our doors?
Do the trees feel sad when they droop their leaves, or the vines and shrubs feel melancholy when their flowers wither and die on their stems? They have a language of their own, no doubt, and one that we can not understand. Man can only listen and have his sympathies awakened by the voices he can understand. If he knew all the pain and the suffering the other things are obliged to endure, he might hesitate to cut a tree or to plow up the bosom of the earth and force it to produce vegetables and grain.
We are in the midst of a great mystery, and only the songs and laughter, the sermons and the tears of others are evidence that we are all human creatures.