MORNING MANNA 10-6-21
SORROW BETTER THAN LAUGHTER
“Sorrow is better than laughter; for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better” -Ecclesiastes 7:3
I suspect that this doesn’t seem true to some folks, but it indeed can be. Sometimes it is only after a time of suffering and sorrow that we realize that this is indeed a fact. Due to my recent illness and what God has done in my life I see it more clearly than ever. The experience reminded me of an old devotion I read from Streams in the Desert many years ago:
“When sorrow comes under the power of Divine grace, it works out a manifold ministry in our lives. Sorrow reveals unknown depths in the soul, and unknown capabilities of experience and service…. trifling people are always shallow, and never suspect the little meannesses in their nature. Sorrow is God’s plowshare that turns up and subsoils the depths of the soul, that it may yield richer harvests. If we had never fallen, or were in a glorified state, then the strong torrents of Divine joy would be the normal force to open up all our souls’ capacities; but in a fallen world, sorrow, with despair taken out of it, is the chosen power to reveal ourselves to ourselves. Hence it is sorrow that makes us think deeply, long, and soberly.
Sorrow makes us go slower and more considerately, and introspect our motives and dispositions. It is sorrow that opens up within us the capacities of the heavenly life, and it is sorrow that makes us willing to launch our capacities on a boundless sea of service for God and our fellows.
We may suppose a class of indolent people living at the base of a great mountain range, who had never ventured to explore the valleys and canyons back in the mountains; and some day, when a great thunderstorm goes careening through the mountains, it turns the hidden glens into echoing trumpets, and reveals the inner recesses of the valley, like the convolutions of a monster shell, and then the dwellers at the foot of the hills are astonished at the labyrinths and unexplored recesses of a region so near by, and yet so little known. So it is with many souls who indolently live on the outer edge of their own natures until great thunderstorms of sorrow reveal hidden depths within that were never hitherto suspected.”
David Stone
Lakeway Baptist Church
5801 FM 1960 E
Humble, TX. 77346
