FOR the last few years it has been my custom to take a small bunch of spring flowers with a text card attached, to each house in a district where I visit. The flowers are greatly prized, and in some instances the cards are preserved from year to year. One beautiful day in spring, having, in company with some friends, visited a lovely valley some distance from our town, we came back with stores of primroses, violets, and bluebells, sufficient for sixty bunches; and, having attached a text to each of them, they were distributed among the houses as usual. There were some bunches left, and I was considering what to do with them, when something seemed to say distinctly, “Take them to the cottage hospital.” Now as this was fully two miles away, and the day was very hot, being tired, I began to excuse myself, when again the words sounded in my mind, “Take them to the cottage hospital.” The flowers were fast drooping, so I thought, “I can hardly offer the sick people these miserable-looking flowers, for they will be still more withered when I get to the hospital in this heat,” and then, for the third time, the words sounded close to me, “Take them to the cottage hospital.”
Then I thought, “This is not my work, but God’s. He surely bids me take His flowers and His messages of mercy to this special place”; and at once I started off. On reaching it I met a young girl who had belonged to my Bible class, and begging her to place the flowers in water to revive them, and then to give them to any who might wish for them, I went my way.
Some months afterward I again met this young girl, who had recovered her health, and was in service. During conversation she suddenly said, “Will you take some more flowers and texts to the cottage hospital? You do not know how much good those did which you took before. I wished I had had a few for every patient. It was so strange, but each one said, after reading the text attached, that it was just the very message that suited her need.”
These were some of the texts: “Fear thou not; for I am with thee” (Isa. 41:10); “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Heb. 13:5); “Call upon Me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me” (Psa. 1:15).
It was by no design on my part that these verses were left, but most of the texts written out referred to sin and its cleansing; such portions of the word of God being, it seemed to me, most suited to those for whom they were intended, and as I visited their houses the people took the flowers they preferred without any reference to the texts. Was it not, therefore, God’s own ordering that the texts, so suited to His weary, suffering ones, should remain? And did He not certainly intend to make them a blessing when He guided me to the hospital quite against my will at first? This little incident teaches us that in God’s sighs nothing is too insignificant to carry out His gracious purposes. T.