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All true desires? Perhaps the word will take you, if you are ill or disabled, to a deep dell in the orchid wood, where for a while the air is quiet, and then, it may be, a clamor of voices will break upon you, and you will be rent with longings to do again. To serve the children of your love has been the joy of your life, and you cannot serve them now. They are upon your heart when you go in before the Lord, but, oh, to be able to do with hands and feet and all that there is of you, once more! O Lord, how long? And you lie down tired out with desire. But this is not the end of that hour in the dell.
The hush of a Presence, a sound of gentle stillness, a Voice you recognize: “My child, what was I doing when I was nailed upon the cross?”
Then you see as we see a landscape in a dream, all Palestine spread at His feet. Cities, villages, crowded with sick folk whom He could have healed, sad folk whom He could have comforted; and He could not heal them, could not comfort them, could not move one little inch towards them; and He loved them, had lived to serve them, and the whole multitude had sought to touch Him, for there went virtue out of Him and healed them all—and now?
“Then said I, Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is written of Me, I delight to do Thy will, O my God: yea, Thy law is within my heart.” The mysterious words rise slowly, one by one; His own words are the answer to His question. And the words are alight, like the lamp in the sanctuary that lifted up its flame continually. In that light you see your calling, and you hear the voice you love best in all the world: “What then, My child, of thee?”
But He was pouring out His soul unto death, and bearing the sin of many, and making intercession for the transgressors—there is not any comparison between what He was doing then and what you are doing now. No, there is not any comparison. And yet He calls you into the fellowship of a new way of obedience. Lo, I come—to do Thy will, O my God. And the lovely old words of the Great Bible of our forefathers fall softly on the ear, “I am content to do it.”
Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body—that is the call now: “Far was the call and farther as I followed...grew there a silence around my Lord and me.”