" Our baby is dead. Just as the sunlight of his joyous life was shedding its brightest beams in our home, God took him. The merry prattle of his childish voice is gone. The house is hushed. A muffled, voiceless sadness broods all around a home that this young life had made bright and happy and radiant with childish innocence and love.
It would not seem so hard to give him up if he had died in his earlier infancy. But after the angel lips had learned to lisp his mother's name, and after his tender childish words were all in all to us, he went away. But we will all soon follow after.
He was born, he lived, he died. This is the sum of every human life. The pall of death lingers around our home, but the saved in Heaven have another voice in their angelic choir. When before he died he so often asked us all to sing, he was hearing the distant music of the land of God. He is with them now, and will wait to welcome us when we, too, are called to join the hosts who have gone on.
We have for many years chronicled the death of other people's children. In every sad notice of death's silent march we have extended words of sympathy as best we could to those bereaved. But in this hour, when our own dear child has left our home never to come again, how empty sounds the voice of human sympathy!
No words can heal the wound in our hearts; no voice can chase away the sadness that lingers about our home. To those who are thus bereaved, all save the voice of God is dumb. But the angels seem to whisper as we drop tears of pain upon these sad lines, ‘He will meet you at the river when the Father calls you home.'
And now let us draw the drapery of silence around our baby's grave. No one can heal our wounded hearts, but the hand of God will touch the scars, and when our last work is done, we will go to meet our darling in a home where there is no death, and where sorrow and sadness never come."
-J. B. Cranfill
Published upon the death of his child. Cranfill (AD 1858-1942) was a Texas Southern Baptist pastor, journalist, denominational leader.
-David R. Brumbelow, Gulf Coast Pastor, October 15, AD 2012.
Related book:
The Spiritual Condition of Infants by Adam Harwood
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A very moving testimony of the reality of grief felt by one who lost his child. But also a testimony of the power of the Christian's certainty of a future in heaven.
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