Text and art by I. Lilias Trotter
The small forerunner, swept by the wind out of the ocean’s heart, falling back, shattered, into the heart without having apparently achieved much. But the tide is the ocean heart itself moving irresistably to victory, yet needing the broken waves, every one of them, to achieve its aim. They are but little waves out here; the ‘thunderous din’ does not at present characterise the progress of Christ’s work… All that matters is that we let ourselves go to the driving force behind, to be sent just as fast and as far as God wills and then to fall back, content as the wave that has spent itself, into that ocean of love from whence we came, waiting there to see the hour of God’s high tide.
There is a wonderful sense of expansion about our love for those who have gone, as if it had escaped earthly fettering, and the pain of parting is just the rending of the sheath to let the flower open out and bloom. And their love for us will have grown in the same way into something pure and inexhaustible, because it is in God, like a river that has got past the surf of the shore and out into the open sea… and with this new sense of union with the whole family in heaven and earth, comes a new freedom to pray for an outpoured Pentecost in this land.