For well over a year, I have been reading the complete works of George MacDonald. He was a Scottish minister/writer/poet who lived from 1824 to 1905. He deeply influenced such writers as C.S. Lewis and Madeline L'Engle. He was also a mentor to Lewis Carroll. When I tell people about him, I don't often get recognition. This is sad, because he was a very important author.
As you might expect, while reading many thousands of pages, the ideas that most interested me were those dealing with death, eternal life, grief. I will endeavor to share some of these things with you, in the hope that they bring comfort and hope to you, as they did for me.
For those who face the grief of death of someone we love:
On the scripture "Jesus wept"and Lazarus' grieving sisters - "It was the aching, loving heart of humanity for which he wept, that needed God so awfully, and could not yet trust in him. Their brother was only hidden in the skirts of their Father's garment, but they could not believe that; they said he was dead-lost-away-all gone, as the children say. And it was so sad to think of a whole world full of the grief of death, that he could not bear it without the human tears to help his heart, as they help ours. It was for our dark sorrows that he wept."
"But things are unbearable just until we have them to bear; their possibility comes with them. For we are not the roots of our own being."
"The merest trifles sometimes rivet the attention in the deepest misery; the intellect has so little to do with grief."
"For I found, as I read [the gospel], that Thy very presence in my thoughts, not as the theologians show Thee, but as Thou showedst Thyself to them who report Thee to us, smoothed the troubled waters of my spirit, so that, even while the storm lasted, I was able to walk upon them to go to Thee."
Regarding the hope of eternity:
"Jesus wanted to make them know and feel that the dead were alive all the time, and could not be far away, seeing they were all with God in whom we live; that they had not lost them though they could not see them, for they were quite within his reach-as much so as ever; that they were just as safe with, and as well looked after by his father and their father, as they had ever been in all their lives. It was no doubt a dreadful-looking thing to have them put in a hole, and waste away to dust, but they were not therefore gone out-they were only gone in! To teach them all this he did not say much, but just called one or two of them back for a while. Of course Lazarus was going to die again, but can you think his two sisters either loved him less, ore wept as much over him the next time he died?"
Narrator is speaking to an old woman who had lost several sons to the sea. " 'But,' I said...'some of your sons were drowned for all that you say about their safety.' 'Well, sir,' she answered, with a sigh, 'I trust they're none the less safe for that.' "
"We have yet learned but little of the blessed power of death. We call it evil! It is a holy, friendly thing. We are not left shivering all the world's night in a stately portico with no house behind it; death is the door to the temple-house, whose God is not seated aloft in motionless state, but walks about among his children, receiving his pilgrim sons in his arms, and washing the sore feet of the weary ones."
And my favorite:
"He who made this room so well worth living in, may surely be trusted with the next!"
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