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14—GOLD LEAF AND LILIES
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IF only we are content to go on laboring, warring, trusting, faithful in a very little, we are led by humble, quiet ways into the will of God, that will which has willed our good from our earliest days until now.
Our nursery thinking lies at the back of our grown-up thought. Gold leaf and lily buds have always made me think of the plans of God, because as a small child I was given a book with gold leaf, and about the same time heard someone quote, “God’s plans like lilies, pure and white, unfold,” and learned to wait for the opening of the close-shut green buds of the lilies in the garden; learned, too, to listen:
He in our childhood with us walks,
And with our thoughts mysteriously He talks;
He often visiteth our minds.
There came a day when I saw golden lilies. It was in a wood in Japan. There was a wall of sheer blue mountain, like the mountain in the greenwood picture; blue sky was showing through the leaves, and everywhere in sheets of flame and gold there were lilies. The old thoughts of childhood met me in that wood, and I was back in my nursery, carefully holding the “book of gold” in my hands.
That book was a tiny thing, but it was magical to me. Its pages were of paper of a curious quality, pinkish in color, fine, firm and untearable. Between them lay the flakes of gold leaf, so delicate that a breath would blow them away, and yet if you were very gentle you could lift them up without crumpling them. They were enchantment, a charm that never wore thin; and anything partly made of wonder (like the opening of a lily bud) and partly of brightness (like the shining of gold leaf) became for me a synonym for the plans of God: so that when I lately read of how gold, that closely compacted metal, becomes transparent (“pure gold like unto clear glass”), it was like seeing a light fall on something that had long lain in a dim corner of one’s room.
For the plans of God for our lives, laid one on the other like the cubic crystals of gold that make up the texture of gold leaf, do often become clear as we go on. We look, and are astonished as we see how all the way by which He has led us, every lesson He has caused us to learn, all the spiritual discipline of the years, converge upon a single point, now at last perceived. We understand, in part at least, why He has led us so. His golden thoughts of love toward us, slowly unfolding in His providence, are transparent now, pure gold, as it were transparent glass.
But there is one question gold does not answer. “Why it should be green when looked through is a mystery.”{12} The X-ray has told why, when it is beaten out to about the 150,000th part of an inch in thickness, it permits the transmission of the rays of light; but why only green rays? Why should the other colors of the spectrum be absorbed, and green alone be transmitted? We do not know. But as in such earthly matters questions unanswered today are answered tomorrow, so it is in the things of the heavenlies. Then shall we know even as also we are known.