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But some are fast in bonds, and to them the greenwood says softly—the words move in the mind like the whisper of wind among the trees—“Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” It says, “The plant called heart’s-ease often grows where we should not expect to find it.” And it says, “After the sad days have passed you will look back and wonder how you were carried through. It will not always be so hard as it has been of late; for after darkness cometh light and after tempest cometh calm.” And this is no fantasy. It shall be so.
Then our hearts go out to Him:
O Lord beloved, my times are in Thy hand;
My very minutes wait on Thy command.
In this still room, O Blessed Master, walk
And with my spirit talk.
It is in simple ways like this that the word is fulfilled: “In the multitude of my thoughts within me, Thy comforts delight my soul.” The woodland picture may perhaps be one of the comforts, only a little one, but very little comforts can give pleasure, even as the very little globes of essence in the myrtle leaf can diffuse the fragrance of the myrtle. Thanks be to God for His little comforting things. And thank God too for the short and easy words in His Book. The least of us can understand them, the weariest can use them—words like the call of the bird when it hears some warning cry, “I flee unto Thee to hide me. Hide me under the shadow of Thy wings.”
But life has been deepened by what we have gone through since first we turned sharply into the dark wood, and if we are in some greenwood now, we are instinctively on the alert lest we be caught in the meshes of any net of luxury. “For he that spends his time in sports, and calls it recreation, is like him whose garment is all made of fringes and his meat nothing but sauce.” One of our Fellowship away on holiday writes of his dread of the fringes and sauce: “There is such a loving thought and care here that I sometimes fear lest the soldier-spirit may be weakened rather than strengthened. Everything is made so easy and so comfortable that I feel more than ever the need of the inner, private discipline which defends the soul against sloth and slackness.”
From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings
(Not thus are spirits fortified,
Not this way went the Crucified),
From all that dims Thy Calvary,
O Lamb of God, deliver me.
We cannot be held fast in peace and nerved to inner, private discipline—to a soldiership that knows nothing of reserve to love that can plunge into very hell to save a soul, unstained by the foulness, unshriveled by the heat—unless we live within sight of Calvary God forgive us for the strange coldness of so much of our love. The calculating love of Christians is the shame of the Church and the astonishment of angels. By Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy cross and passion; by Thy precious death and burial; by Thy glorious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, from the sin of coldness, Good Lord, deliver us.