I have a file where I put pictures of people I find interesting. And if I happened upon them I would like to strike up a conversation. These woman is an example; with her modest stylishness, remnants of the sixties; her love for the outdoors betrayed by her coastal complexion; a confident air but cautious; self-assured but open; content with her diminishing beauty and a twinkle in her eye, but with no appetite for the shallow.  

  When I ran across this picture it stunned me. Oh God, it reminds me of all of those I talk with who have suffered so much, but still retain a beauty and a hope within that refuses to die. God reaches the darkest recesses of the soul. 

 George Matheson defines what he considers "witnessing" or Soul-winning" with a broad and encompassing description. Few measure up but as we grow to understand the mind of Christ we edge closer.    

  "Kingdom expansion is something that engages "enterprise" and the anxious responsibilities that come with it; the study to learn how to lift the downcast, the seeking out it takes to find those in need: locomotion, movement, rising up and acting, trusting with the willingness to be betrayed; investigating, as the Bible states, 'considering the poor' and how to bring remedy without enabling, which requires deliberation, judgment, discernment. Not simply becoming a, 'hand but not heart', dispensary of charity."

I remember a great quote by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 

 "There are soul-artists, who go through this world, looking among their fellows with reverence, as one looks among the dust and rubbish of old shops for hidden works of Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, and finding them, however cracked and torn and painted over with tawdry daubes of pretenders, immediately recognize the divine original, and set themselves to cleanse and restore. Such are God’s real priests, whose ordination and anointing are from the Holy Spirit; and he who has not this enthusiasm is not ordained of God, though whole synods of bishops laid hands on him.”

  Sometimes we have to just stop and drink in the beauty and majesty of God's creative power. 

Why did Jesus tell the leper not to tell anyone about his healing?

  "The answer is that the fame of that presence would have quickened the drying of human tears. It would have made benevolence easy. It would have congregated the world of Jewish sufferers round a common center. It would have dispensed with the need of private enterprise. It would have relieved many hearts of anxious responsibilities. It would have sent each inquirer to the fountainhead.     "Just because of all these benefits; just because the visible presence of Jesus would have made charity an easy thing.'

Remember what it is that Jesus desires. It is not simply the healing of humanity; it is man's education to be the healer of humanity. From the moment in which He became head of the disciples, His 'league of pity' His primary object became not the abolition of the hospital, but the training for the hospital.

To Him the most precious part of that sympathy was the seeking out of disease; 'The Son of Man,' He says, 'is come to seek that which was lost.' These words express a real fact of His experience; they express the conviction that for Him all sympathy must begin in seeking. Therefore He desired that His followers should also seek.

 He did not wish all cases of distress to be brought to the door because then there would be no help in aiding them. If His power would have been proclaimed, there would have been a visible earthly center around which would have circled the victims of sorrow. Then the disciples would have been spared the pain of locomotion, spared the pain of seeking and investigating. There would cease to be any need for "considering the poor." The function of sympathy would be limited to the hand. It would no more require deliberation, judgment, discernment. It would lose its character as an intellectual power. It would become an attribute rather of the body than of the soul.

Therefore in the days of His earthly presence He forbade its members to make Him known - forbade them to render easy that path of benevolence which ought to be a path of anxious inquiry." Matheson.  

This is a lengthy quote, but a most important one. I believe this was what Jesus was trying to explain to the Pharisees by His life and actions, but like us, we have missed it.  

 "It is a remarkable saying of Jesus that, "The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand." What is the idea of these words? It is the conception of a transference of the reins of Divine government. 

I think that at this time Jesus said to Himself: until now in the faith of Israel, the Father has given the charge of man to the angels. The time has come for a change of thought. From this point on man shall have the charge of man. 

The government of my Father has always been a vicarious government; but up till now it has devolved upon the angelic throng. Let it now devolve on the human. 

Why should an angel be the best help for the earth-born soul! Has he taken the seed of Abraham? Does he know the frailty of man's frame? Has his training in the school of sorrow been such as to make him a fitting guardian of the weak? Is not man the fitting guardian of man? My Father desires to transfer the government. He calls upon the sons of men to lift those burdens of humanity which to the eyes of the past generation were laid upon the arms of the cherubim'

Such I understand to be the real bearing of the apostolic call. It is the formation of a human brotherhood to take, in relation to man, the place of angels. Up to this time the beings outside of humanity had been looked upon as the sole ministers to man. To be fed by mysterious agencies was to be fed providentially. 

It seemed more reverent to believe that Elijah was ministered to by the ravens than to be ministered to by Arabians. It was really less reverent.

Intelligent ministration is the most providential ministration. The ravens and the angels are both removed from man. They are so from opposite reasons; the ravens are too far below, the angels too far above. Perfect ministration is founded upon a kindred experience. Such can only be found within the circle of the human. 

Jesus woke the world into that consciousness. He proclaimed that if ministration was to be complete, man must be the angel to man.

That is the thought at the root of what is called the Christian ministry. It is the idea that sympathy with human weakness demands participation in that weakness. In the strength of that conviction Jesus formed the league of pity - a human league, a brotherhood of man with man for the support of man. He initiated a movement in the heart of humanity which, though in its origin was no bigger than the eddies of the pool of Bethesda, was destined in the fullness of time to become a very ocean of love.

 Oh God, let me be the apostle of the week and weary. Send not the cherubim and the seraphim; send not the angel and the archangel. These have no drooping wing; they are never tired in their flight; they cannot sympathize with faintness. But I have borne the burden of the day; I have been tried in the furnace of pain. I have trod the dusty plain, I have descended the deep valley, I have climbed the arduous steep. I know the path of the weary, I can guide where the celestials never go; make me a helper in Thy ministrant band." Matheson.

  Just when I think I have a better understanding of Christ, I read something that shows how dull my heart is. The question was posed,"Why did Jesus choose to heal the lame man at the pool of Bethesda? There were multitudes there that were sick, blind and lame; why did Jesus choose this man out of the multitude? 

The man was alone..... 

 The face of this daughter of Christ haunts me and speaks to me. 
It haunts me because she is so easy to forget in the wash of trifles. 
She speaks to me in every book of the Bible; "do to me as you would have done to yourself." 
May her plea burn in my heart and etch in my memory. 
It is the face of Christ....

"In everything give thanks." 1Thess. 5:18

 "Surely this is a hard saying! Am I too thank God for everything? Am I to thank Him for bereavement, for pain, for poverty, for toil?

Must I lift up my hands over my dead and say, "Father, I thank You that you have taken away my friend"? Is it possible? Is it human? Is it desirable? Is it the will of Love that love should violate its own law? Is it pleasing to my Father that loss should be pleasant to me?

  Be still my soul; you have misread the message. It is not to give thanks for everything, but to give thanks in everything. It is not to praise God for the night, but to bless Him that the night is not deeper.

Consider, you have never reached the absolute depth of any darkness; you have never come to the step which has no step below it.

I read of Jesus that He gave thanks over the symbol of His broken body. What does that mean? That He rejoiced in being sad? No, but that He was not perfectly sad. It tells me that even the Man of Sorrow had not reached the uttermost sorrow.

In your hour of sorrow, give thanks like Jesus. Keep your eye, not on the step above, but on the step below-- the step to which you have not yet descended. Look not up at the height you have lost; look down on the depth you have not fallen too.

Your Father has never allowed the uttermost deep of misery to any human spirit. God never fills the cup of Jesus to the brim; there is always a vacant space reserved for light and air.

Is it not written that He has put my tears into His bottle; the quantity of your grief’s are measured; there is a line which they cannot pass? Thank God for that boundary, oh, my soul." George Matteson.

“It is the type of an eternal truth— that the soul's armour is never well set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honour of manhood fails.” -John Ruskin, in Lilies