Text and art by I. Lilias Trotter
There is a wonderful sense of expansion – endless expansion – about our love for those who are gone – as if it had escaped earthly fettering – and the pain of the parting is just the rending of the sheath, as it were, to let the flower have its way. And their love for us will have grown in the same way, only in fuller measure into something pure and fathomless and boundless and inexhaustible, because it is “in God.” It makes one understand a little how, suddenly, they are the same and not the same, because we are already just that, as far as they are concerned – It is like a river that has got past the surf of the shore and out into the ocean.
A verse in Cant. 2 has lit up into beauty these last days. “The voice of my Beloved – behold He cometh – He standeth behind our wall, He looketh in at the windows (R.V.) shewing Himself through the lattice.” It is “our” wall – His and ours, that barrier of things visible that separates us – He on the radiant side of it, we on the dark side – And the breeches that come through sorrow and loss are windows through which that love and light stream in – windows to look out by – not doors as yet. And through them we catch glimpses of His Face looking in. And even the multiplied little rifts – the lattice – shew Him too, though more dimly – all the breaks that give an outlet through the sun to the unseen, are infinitely worth while, for those passing visions of the Son of God on the other side.
Time is nothing to God – nothing in its speeding, nothing in its halting – He is the God that inhabiteth eternity and can afford to tarry His leisure no matter how short time is.
And all that outworking of His Grace has come so silently – “not with observation” like His work in all growth around – so that one can hardly tell when or how the expansion has come – all one can tell is that we have had nothing to do with its evolution except a measure of blind obedience and oh that that measure had been fuller…
