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“What new, wonderful thing did you find?” we asked one of our younger boys after his first day in the wooded hills that are our western boundary.
He was silent for a moment, evidently pondering the new, wonderful things of the day; then he said, “Orchids.” Orchids crammed in a hothouse (poor things) may appear fantastic rather than beautiful, but at home in their own world they are always the flowers of surprise and of wonder; and the child’s heart that lives on in most of us loves a surprise and never loses the sense of wonder. So this rare lady’s slipper which grows in shady woods, like the one seen through the window in the wall, shall gather to herself all that a flower may of the lovely element of surprise that waits on wonder and doubles joy.
The spiritual woods where the lover walks are full of the unexpected. The flower of forgetfulness grows there—forgetting the things that are behind “as one experience after another falls behind me into the past.” This flower is not blue like the forget-me-not. I see it with a purple bloom upon it, the color of ripe grapes, or yellow, like corn. Joseph found that flower and called his first child after it, Forgetting, “For God, said he, hath made me forget,” and his second he called Fruitful, “For God hath caused me to be fruitful.” “God’s lethe is fruitfulness,” said Dr. Andrew Bonar.
It is true. Try to recall what caused you to write a date in the margin of your Bible near to some word of strong consolation, and you will find that you remember the consolation but forget the detailed pangs of pain, or, if remembered, they have ceased to be pain: “For God hath made me forget all my toil.” It is not just a natural forgetting: “God hath made me forget,” and He does most tenderly go on to add to this forgetting, fruit. “Today, when I was having my quiet time,” writes a child of this family who is away from home just now, “I came across what I wrote in my private notebook a year ago, and it helped me then, so I shared it with my mother: For what is it that your Father’s tender heart and loving eye looks for first, but the wounded place on which to spend His chiefest care?”
“The bee is little among such as fly; but her fruit is the chief of sweet things.” May this honeybee fly far. But if our little Tara were asked why that drop of honey tasted so sweet to her a year I think she would find it easier to recall the sweetness of the comfort than the hurt that it healed. There are hurts that ache for years; yet even so it is as though a hand plucked forth the painful sting and restored comforts unto us. And the honey of our comforting is turned into comfort for others. Like the honey in the wood that enlightened the eyes of the weary Jonathan—“Mine eyes have been enlightened because I tasted a little of this honey”—it is used to help God’s fighting men.