Mabel’s mother used to sometimes tell her, when she was disobedient during the day, that the remerance of her naughty doings would be “a thorn in her pillow” at night. But Mabel was too young at first to understand the meaning of “a thorn in her pillow.”
When she grew a little older, she went to visit her grandmother. It was so jolly all day to be out in the fields, chasing the butterflies, and gathering posies. But night came, and Mabel was put to bed. Her grandmother peeped in to see her before she retired, and found the child asleep, with a tear on her cheek. Next morning when Mabel got up, her grandmother said,
“I fear my little girl was home-sick last night, after she went to bed, for I saw a tear on her pretty cheek.”
“O, no, grandmother dear, it was not that.”
“What was it then?”
Mabel hung her head. There was something causing her to be uneasy, and she was unwilling to let it be known. At last, clasping her arms around her grandmother’s neck, she burst into tears, and said, “There was a thorn in my pillow last night, grandmother; for, as I lay awake, thinking of my dear mother far away, I remembered how disobedient I had been to her, and she so kind and I was very unhappy.”
There are many little boys and girls like Mabel. They do not think of the wrong of disobeying their parents and sinning against God, until they are far away from them; then it becomes a thorn in their pillow; they wish they had not done so. They pay little heed to the loving words of their teachers in the Sunday School; but, one day, far away on some distant shore, they wish they could just hear their voices once more.
And thus it will be with souls in eternity who have despised the gospel, and rejected Christ. There will be “a thorn in the pillow” of every Christless one in hell. Remorse will lay hold in relentless power on every despiser of the love of God. Memory will bring the past to mind. The slighted oppounities of salvation: the stifled convictions: the quenched anxieties.
O, my dear young friend, do not fill up your pillow thus with thorns. Depend on it, your sins will prick your conscience sooner or later, in time or in eternity.
Do not slight the Son of God, or despise His love any longer. This will be the sharpest thorn in hell. A slighted Christ—a despised salvation.
ML 09/30/1945