The tempest has fallen upon your house, and the winds howl fiercely at your door. Yet hear this: the hand that sends the storm holds the helm, and he who permits the billows to roll can say to them, "Peace, be still." Your husband's grief has grown bitter, and he drinks the gall of self-accusation; your daughter, like a tender vine, bends low under the same shadow. But God sees the breaking heart and the contrite spirit, and he does not despise them.
Think not that your present trouble is proof of his anger. Bildad and his companions thought so of Job, but they knew nothing of the secret purposes of the Lord. Even Job himself, a man of whom the Most High said "there is none like him in the earth," was brought to sit among the ashes, scraping his sores with a potsherd. Yet what was the Lord's design? To reveal Job to himself, to strip away every prop of self-righteousness, and then to give him double for all his loss. "You shall forget your misery, and remember it as waters that pass away." The sharpness of the present pain blinds the eye to the future joy, but the promise stands sure for those who are in Christ: the morning comes after the weeping of the night.
Your husband is in the place where the Almighty vexes the soul, but mark this: if the Almighty has troubled, the Almighty alone can comfort. There is no wound so deep that the Balm of Gilead cannot heal it. All the laws of nature, all the schemes of men, are but the skirts of his robe; the force behind them is divine. His loss came not by chance but by appointment, and the same appointment will bring restoration in its season. Let him not charge himself foolishly where God has not charged him. Job stood upon his integrity because he was a man of uprightness, yet even he had to learn to lay his hand upon his mouth. We are wrong when we judge the Lord by feeble sense; he is right even when his ways are darkest.
Your pleading for guidance in speech and act is right, it is the cry of a soul that knows its own emptiness. But know this: the comfort you long to give them will not flow from your own eloquence or wisdom. It comes from a quickened soul. "This is my comfort in my affliction, for thy word hath quickened me." The letter of the word, the well-meant counsel, these are dry bones. But when the Spirit himself takes the promise and makes it life within you, then you become a wellspring for others. Pray not merely for words to speak, but for such a vital, inward revival that your very presence in that house is as a hearth-fire on a cold night.
Do you ask how to speak? Speak of the Shepherd who leads through the wilderness to bring his flock to better pasture. Tell them, tell yourself, that the anchor holds, though the ship creaks in the gale. I have felt the cable run out in the dark, and my heart has quaked; but when I knew the anchor had gripped the solid ground, I understood my safety. Christ is that anchor, and he has entered within the veil. He knows the pang of a sorrowful spirit, for he was acquainted with grief. "O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?"
Comfort alone is not enough, for our hearts are prone to turn ease into idleness. God sends comfort and constancy together, that we may be established in every good word and work. Let your husband and daughter not be swallowed up in brooding; lift their eyes to some small duty this very day. The hand that is idle grows cold; the heart that serves another, even in a little thing, finds a strange warmth stealing back into it. Your own calling now is to be a Ruth to Naomi, to cleave to them and point, by every quiet devotion, to the God who has not forsaken the habitation of his righteousness.
Though your latter end seems far off, it is not. The Lord will yet make the habitation of righteousness prosperous. At the beginning the work is small, like the etchings on a plate, but the Divine Engraver will cut the lines deeper and spread the design further than you now dream. The very desires you feel for holiness, the faint stirrings of trust amid the storm, these are the pledge of increase. Wait on him; he has not forgotten to be gracious. His ears are open to your desperate cry, and his heart is tender toward those who tremble at his word. The Almighty has vexed your house, but he will also restore it, and you shall remember this anguish only as a dark backdrop to a dawn of double blessing.
