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6—CHERRY BLOSSOMS
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THE sunshine is streaming into my little room; and I can see (by twisting my head) a tiny glimpse of the sky It is a joy to feel the air coming on my face, though sometimes, and particularly in the spring, I have a big longing to get right out of doors beyond four walls, and to feel the wind and sunshine, and the rain too, upon me.
“It is twenty-one years this year since I could sit up, and for nineteen years it has been this one position in bed; but isn’t it wonderful that He enables us to triumph, and to rejoice in Him?
“Some anemones traveled to me from Edinburgh the other day, and they look fresh and beautiful still. Then I have two little primroses, and a scrap of moss, and several daffodils from a garden in Ayrshire.” This from a recent letter brought the cherry blossoms into this book.
The power to find pleasure not only in the masses of blossoms that gather round the ruin of human hope, but in each spray, and more—in the very petals and stamens of each little flower, and even in the faint pencil-line of the shadow of the stamen on the petal—is one of the dearest gifts that is given to the Lord’s bondmen. It is common to them all.
“Old cast clouts and rotten rags”{4}—one would not naturally write such unpleasant words on the same page as “cherry blossoms.” But the spirit that characterizes this happy letter is the same as that which caused the prisoner Jeremiah, who was drawn up from the miry dungeon in Jerusalem 2,500 years ago, to remember the rags that kept his “armholes” from being cut by the cords. There is always something to be happy about if we look for it:
Two men looked through prison bars,
The one saw mud, the other stars.