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This writing and the life of the day are closely intertwined. That prayer-song was written down, and then the mail brought letters from many countries. Some were Rose-letters, as we call those that come from thorny places like hospitals and yet tell of comforting roses. They often make me want to revise the little Rose From Brier book, for its writer barely knows the alphabet of pain, and its readers know so much more than that. One told of how the patient “all bandaged up could at last read with part of an eye,” and another told of a captive to a “dreadful kind of bone disease” who in that far land of great distress was finding the flowers of God. And because I know that to some like these such a prayer as “Make me Thy laborer, Make me Thy warrior,” may be almost a hurt, I will add something with them, and only them, in mind.
The hardest laboring and fighting is not that which engages hands and feet and busy brain. It is done out of sight. In those secret places where Spirit deals with spirit, and spirit yields itself up to Spirit, forces are at work whose powers we have no means of measuring. The doctor, the nurse, the ward maid, the visitor, see only an ordinary bed, and the one in that bed feels like a worm and no man many a time, but the Unseen Watchers see a powerhouse. Travelers set forth from that bed and they reach the uttermost corners of the earth. Long prayer is not needed to send them forth. “Short prayer pierceth heaven.” A word, a look is enough. This labor and this fighting can go on, and will (if the spirit be kept in tune with the Eternal Spirit), from the rising of the morning till the stars appear. This is life at its hardest. For I do not think that there is any comparison between the hardness of such a life and life in the open, when we labored in the work with our sword girded by our side, and he that sounded the trumpet was not far off—there is something exhilarating in the sound of the trumpet, and it is delightful to build the wall in company with willing fellow builders. But what if He who has kept the hardest until now has kept also His good wine until now? It would be just like Him to do that.
In the mountain forests to the west of Dohnavur our children find the cocoon of the atlas moth. It hangs from a twig, like a small brown bag tied up and left there and forgotten, a mere two inches of papery bag, and however often we see it we are never prepared for the miracle that emerges. For miracle it is: a large, almost bird-like creature struggles slowly through the very narrow neck of the bag. It has wings of crimson and pink, and blended green of various soft tones, shading off into terracotta, brown, old-gold. Each wing has a window made of a clear substance like a delicate flake of talc, and on the edge of each is a pattern of wavy lines or dots, or some other dainty device. From wingtip to wingtip, nine, sometimes ten, inches of beauty, one of God’s lovely wonders—that is what comes out of the brown paper bag. Nothing preserved in a glass case can show it, for the colors fade, but fresh from the hands of its Creator it is like something seen in a dream, pure fairyland.
The radiant emergence of butterfly from chrysalis has often been used to illustrate that which will be when we put on immortality, but I am thinking of this exquisite thing in another way now. What if our life within these detaining months or years be like the life within the dull brown bag of the cocoon? One day something will emerge to the glory of His grace. Can we not, then, sustained by the Bread of heaven and the Good Wine, continue in this hidden labor and spiritual fight till the sunset colors kindle and the stars appear?