God's mercies often come suddenly, and with a rush and a completeness
that outrun our expectations and our power of immediate comprehension.
And sometimes He sends us sorrows in such battalions and so
overwhelming that we are dazed for the moment. A Psalmist touched a
deep experience when he sang, 'When the Lord turned again the captivity
of Zion, we were like unto them that dream.'
The angel has to be gone before we are sure that he was really here.
The tumult of emotion in an experience needs to be calmed down before
we understand the experience. Reflection discovers more of heaven and
of God in the great moments of our lives than was visible to us while
we were living through them,
There is one region in which this is especially true--that of the
religious life. There sometimes attend its beginnings in a soul a
certain excitement and perturbation which disable from calm realising
of the greatness of the change which has passed. And it is well when
that excitement is quieted down and succeeded by meditative reflection
on the treasures that have been poured into the lap, almost as in the
dark. No man understands what he has received when he first receives
Christ and Christ's gifts. It occupies a lifetime to take possession of
that which we possess from the first in Him, and the oldest saint is as
far from full possession of the unspeakable and infinite 'gift of God,'
as the babes in Christ are.
But, looking more generally at this characteristic of not rightly
understanding the great epochs of our lives till they are past, we may
note that, while in part it is inevitable and natural, there is an
element of fault in it. If we lived in closer fellowship with God, we
should live in an atmosphere of continual calm, and nothing, either
sorrowful or joyful, would be able so to sweep us off our feet that we
should be bewildered by it. Astonishment would never so fill our souls
as that we could not rightly appraise events, nor should we need any
time, even in the thick of the most wonderful experiences, to 'come to'
ourselves and discern the angel.
But if it be so that our lives disclose their meanings best, when we
look back on them, how much of the understanding of them, and the
drawing of all its sweetness out of each event in them, is entrusted to
memory! And how negligent of a great means of happiness and strength we
are, if we do not often muse on 'all the way by which God the Lord has
led us these many years in the wilderness'! It is needful for Christian
progress to 'forget the things that are behind,' and not to let them
limit our expectations nor prescribe our methods, but it is quite as
needful to remember our past, or rather God's past with us, in order to
confirm our grateful faith and enlarge our boundless hope.