“In the evening my wife died.” The light of the home went out. Darkness brooded over the face of every familiar thing. The trusted companion who had shared all the changes of the ever-changing way was taken from my side. The light of our fellowship was suddenly extinguished as by some mysterious hand stretched forth from the unseen. I lost “the desire of mine eyes.” I was alone. “In the evening my wife died. The next morning . . .”

Aye, what about the next morning, when the light broke almost obtrusively upon a world which had changed into a cemetery containing only one grave? “The next morning I did as I had been commanded.”

The command had been laid upon him in the days before his bereavement. Life in his home had been a source of inspiring fellowship. In the evening-time, after the discharge of the burdensome tasks of the day, he had turned to his home as weary, dust-choked pilgrims turn to a bath; and immersed in the sweet sanctities of wedded life, he had found such restoration of soul as fitted him for the renewed labor of the morrow. But “in the evening my wife died.” The home was no longer a refreshing bath, but part of the dusty road; no longer an oasis, but a repetition of the wilderness.

How now shall it be concerning the prophet’s command? “In the evening my wife died. The next morning” the commandment? How does the old duty appear in the gloom of the prophet’s bereavement? Duty still, clamant and clamorous now in the shadows as it was loud and importunate in the light. What shall the prophet do? Take up the old burden, and faithfully trudge the old road. Go out in his loneliness, and go on with the old tasks. But why? You will find the secret of it all in the last clause of the chapter:

“You will be a sign to them, and they will know that I am the LORD” (v. 27).

A brokenhearted prophet patiently and persistently pursuing an old duty and by his manner of doing it, compelling people to believe in the Lord! That is the secret motive of the heavy discipline.

The great God wants our conspicuous crises to be occasions of conspicuous testimony; our seasons of darkness to be opportunities for the unveiling of the Divine. He wants duty to shine more resplendently because of the environing shadows. He wants tribulation only to furbish and burnish our signs. He wants us to manifest the sweet grace of continuance amid all the sudden and saddening upheavals of our intensely varied life. This was the prophet’s triumph. He made his calamity a witness to the eternal. He made his very loneliness minister to his God. He made his very bereavement intensify his calling. He took up the old task, and in taking it up he glorified it. “In the evening my wife died. The next morning I did as I had been commanded.”

The evening sorrow will come to all of us: what shall we be found doing in the morning? We shall have to dig graves; have burials: how shall it be with us when the funeral is over? J. H. JOWETT

Make a pulpit of every circumstance.