“It can be; it has been. What for, do you suppose?”
“To teach some lesson. I am learning—oh, how bitterly!—that His teaching is the best of His gifts.”
“So it is, child; but oh, how we have to be crushed before we can believe it. Is your life so hard? It appears a very happy life to me.”
“So every one else thinks. I suppose it would be, but that I make my own trials; do I make them? No, I don’t! How can I make things hard when I only do what seems the only right thing to do. Tell me about that somebody who was deceived—like me,” she added.
“He was a priest; he ministered before the Lord, and he believed in David, because he was an honorable man, and high in the king’s household; so when David came to him and said: ‘The king hath commanded me a business, and hath said unto me, Let no man know it,’ of course, he believed him, and when he asked him for bread the old priest would have given it, not thinking that in harboring the king’s son-in-law he was guilty of treason; but he had no bread; he had nothing but the shew-bread, which only the priests might eat. He did not dare give him that until he asked counsel of the Lord. No priest had ever dared before, and how could he dare? But David and his men were starving, they dared go to no one else for help; but the priest didn’t know that, poor, old, trustful man, so he asked counsel, and having obtained permission, he gave to David the hallowed bread. That was right, because our Lord approves of it; then David asked for Goliath’s sword, and he gave him that, and went to sleep that night as sweetly as the night before, I have no doubt, because he had asked counsel of the Lord and followed it.”
“Did any harm come to him?” asked Tessa, quickly.
“Harm! He lost his head; Saul slew him for treason; and he pleaded before the king: ‘And who is so faithful among all thy servants as David, which is the king’s son-in-law, and goeth at thy bidding, and is honorable in thine house?’ God could have warned him or have brought to his ears the news that David was an outlaw, but He suffered him to be deceived and lose his life for trusting in the man who was telling him a lie.”
After a silence Tessa said: “He had to obey! I’m glad that he obeyed; I believe that was written just for me. I asked God once to let somebody love me, and I trusted him, because I thought that God had given him to me—and it has broken my heart with shame. I did not know before that He let me be deceived; I knew that I was obeying Him, but I thought that my humiliation was my punishment for doing I knew not what.”
“Now I know the secret of some of your articles that I have cried over; not less than ten people told me how much they were helped by that article of yours, ‘Night and Day.’”
“I have three letters that I will show you sometime; I know that my trouble has worn a channel in my heart through which God’s blessing flows; except for that I should have almost died.”