Dear Friend - How little I know you!

How little we know about our fellow men, and how little they know about us. The smile may play upon the face when the heart is near to breaking. The hidden heartache of which the poets speak is very common. Few men or women live a long life that there does not come an abiding sorrow. We live with these sorrows until they become familiar friends, we may sometimes leave them and go visiting into the fields of laughter and of song, but at eventide we are back again with our sorrow.  

The character of these hidden sorrows varies with each individual. Sometimes it is the memory of a broken home. Sometimes it is the memory of a broken friendship. Sometimes it is the loss of the heart’s love beneath the flowers in the garden of the dead. Sometimes it is the bitter word that stings the more with the years. Oh, there are countless aches to the countless millions of [people]. Humanity has not yet sung a song that has not held a minor chord. The weary-hearted, the broken-hearted, sit beside the rivers as Israel at Babylon and cannot sing because memory has driven song out of their lives.  

The hidden sorrow of our hearts ought to make us very tender with others. We are partners in the valleys of pain. The word ought to be soft, since we may open again the wound that has not healed. A fellow feeling ought to make us wondrous kind.  

But the hidden sorrows of life make religion more real and the need of God more felt. There is a chastened joy in the faith that tells of a “land that is fairer than day,” a “home of the soul,” where no sorrow comes, and where the song of life is never lost. But religion has a meaning to us here that soothes the burdened spirit. God has heart-ease for hidden griefs. He knows how to minister to spirits in pain. And he is a very present help in trouble. The soul in its sorrows has a desper­ate need of God, and then we come into such fellowship with him that our love is ecstasy. Selected.