My wife’s departure has been made a wonderful blessing to me already―one much-loved brother wrote to me and said: “I do trust that the Lord will strengthen you to endure this trial, and to glorify Him even ‘in the fires’.” Yes, God knows, to bring Him glory, I would gladly pass through all the fires of affliction, for “in all their afflictions He was afflicted.” If I need these cleansing fires, I thank my God for sending them. I was in the cemetery today near where my dead is lain. I prayed that I might know more of the “power of His resurrection” — the flowers that lay upon the grave were dying, but the heavens above were filled with light. I thought of the beloved one whose body, taken from her earthly home, was in that grave, the words came to me, “sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in dishonor, to be raised in glory; sown in weakness, to be raised in power; sown a natural body, to be raised a spiritual body.” The sun was shining from a clear sky, and bathing the grave with light, and the words came, “As we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly...” flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God: neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. And then as the deeper, fuller glories of the mysteries of resurrection power were unfolded, we heard, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be chanced.” And then the light upon the grave seemed to write the triumph message from the skies, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God Who giveth us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ.” The victory is ours, though death has seemed to claim his prey. But the heavens are filled with light, and the Victor over death and the grave is on the throne, and He says, to still all questioning and to solve every doubt, “I am He that liveth, and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hades and of death.” So faith can say, “Lord Jesus, Thou hast the keys of the grave of our beloved one. We can leave her in Thy charge in the sure and certain hope that she will be among the blessed and holy in the first resurrection.”
Eyes may overflow with tears, and hearts may well-nigh be broken in the desert loneliness of the silences of life, but we look up and say, “Lord Jesus, it is Thy will and it is best. Our loved one is with Thee, and we shall meet again and Thou remainest.”