Empty hands and unutterable longings

I promised (to my own blog at least) to come back with an example of the faith of Elizabeth Prentiss worked out in her life, from her biography More Love to Thee by Sharon James. There is plenty in this book to encourage trust in the small things, but it’s seen most powerfully in the big things. Thus I have been sitting here reading again the account of the day her second child died, which is something truly harrowing. As the biographer herself writes “one cannot but be struck by the appalling mismanagement of this death”. I shan’t try and write out great slabs of this chapter, but the end of the journal entry of that day is this:

Empty hands, empty hands, a worn-out exhausted body, and unutterable longings to flee from a world that has had for me so many sharp experiences. God help me, my baby, my baby!

And afterwards Elizabeth would write the poem:

One child and two green graves are mine

This is God’s gift to me;

A bleeding, fainting, broken heart –

This is my gift to Thee.

Sometime later, when a close friend, Carrie, lost her own two children, Elizabeth wrote her the letter below. Carrie had been prostrate with grief but on receiving this letter writes that she was "fairly aroused, lifted up, placed upon my feet":

Is it possible, is it possible that you are made childless? I feel distressed for you my dear friend, I long to fly to you and weep with you; it seems as if I must say or do something to comfort you. But God only can help you now and how thankful I am for a throne of grace and power where I can commend you, again and again, to Him who doeth all things well. I never realise my affliction in the loss of my children as I do when death enters the house of a friend. Then I feel that I can’t have it so. But why should I think I know better than my Divine Master what is good for me, or good for those I love? Dear Carrie, I trust that in this hour of sorrow you have with you that Presence, before which alone sorrow and sighing flee away. God is left; Christ is left; sickness, accident, death cannot touch you here. Is this not a blissful thought? … May sorrow bring us both nearer to Christ! I can almost fancy my little Eddy has taken your little Maymee by the hand and led her into the bosom of Jesus. How strange our children, our own little infants, have seen Him in his glory, whom we are only yet longing for and struggling towards!

Another sweet daughter has been lent to me of the Lord. Lent, LENT, let me repeat to myself in remembrance of my own sorrow and of yours.