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Before that peace can be ours—the peace that truly passeth all understanding, for who can understand how it can be at all?—there must be a renunciation of faithless anxiety. To ask for that seems to be asking for the impossible. The father of the family is ill. He thinks of wife and children; his whole being is keyed to one intense desire to be well, to be with them. The mother is ill; her heart cries out to fly to her children and gather them under her wings. The bread-earner, caring for widowed mother and sisters, is disabled; would he not be heartless if he were at peace? The son or daughter pledged to the Master’s business in a distant land has letters telling of need at home, and is crushed and torn. The child all but saved is swept off by a dark wave. Prayer is agony then. How can there be any peace? The convert is sucked back into the pit, and the heart that loved is broken. But life will suggest only too many illustrations of griefs which can come down like an avalanche over the soul and bury it in debris. It is far then from its mountain peak.
I do not know of any way of escape from that debris so swift and so certain as to ask oneself the question the angel Uriel asked the prophet Esdras, “Lovest thou that people better than He that made them?” That question sounds the depths. There is a melting tenderness in it too, that prepares us for the beautiful words that follow, when the messenger seems to lose himself in his message, so that we hear a Greater than angels speak:
“Number Me them that are not yet come, gather Me together the drops that are scattered abroad, make Me the flowers green again that are withered, open Me the chambers that are closed, and bring Me forth the winds that in them are shut up, or show Me the image of a voice: and then I will declare to thee the travail that thou seekest to see....Like as thou canst do none of these things that I have spoken of even so canst thou not find out My judgment, or the end of the love that I have promised unto My people....In the beginning, when the earth was made, before the outgoings of the world were fixed...then did I consider these things, and they all were made through Me alone, and through none other: as by Me also they shall be ended, and by none other.”
This is not Holy Scripture, but it is wisdom whose price is above rubies. Lovest thou thy beloved better than He that made them? Trust My love for thy beloved.