Sorrow and Suffering - Part II

Sorry, but I kind of got sidetracked in my writing. But I must say it was all good. You will definitely be reading about it later. Anyhow, we left poor Much-Afraid with having to make an enormous decision. Would she stay as she was? Would she go back to the familiarity of her old life? Or would she trust her loving Shepherd and take Him at His Word?

Much-Afraid shuddered. The choice seemed terrible. Fear she knew only too well, but Sorrow and Suffering had always seemed to her the two most terrifying things which she could encounter. How could she go with them and abandon herself to their power and control? It was impossible. Then she looked at the Shepherd and suddenly knew she could not doubt him, could not possibly turn back from following him; that if she were unfit and unable to love anyone else in the world, yet in her trembling, miserable little heart, she did love him. Even if he asked the impossible, she could not refuse.

She looked at him piteously, then said, “Do I wish to turn back? O Shepherd, to whom should I go? In all the world I have no one but you. Help me to follow you, even though it seems impossible. Help me to trust you as much as I long to love you.”

As he heard these words the Shepherd suddenly lifted his head and laughed – a laugh full of exultation and triumph and delight. It echoed round the rocky walls of the little canyon in which they stood until for a moment or two it seemed as though the whole mountain range was laughing with him. The echoes bounded higher and higher, leaping from rock to rock, and from crag to crag, up to the highest summits, until it seemed as though the last faint echoes of it were running into heaven itself.

When the last note had faded into silence, his voice said very softly, “Thou art all fair, my love; there is not spot in thee” (Cant. 4:7). Then he added, “Fear not, Much-Afraid, only believe. I promise that you shall not be put to shame. Go with Sorrow and Suffering, and if you cannot welcome them now, when you come to the difficult places where you cannot manage alone, put your hands in theirs confidently and they will take you exactly where I want you to go.”

Much-Afraid stood quite still, looking up into his face, which now had such a happy exultant look, the look of one who above all things else delights in saving and delivering. In her heart the words of a hymn, written by another of the Shepherd’s followers, began to run through her mind and she started to sing softly and sweetly:
Let sorrow do its work, send grief or pain;
Sweet are thy messengers, sweet their refrain.
If they but work in me, more love, O Christ, to thee,
More love to thee, more love to thee.

“Others have gone this way before me,” she thought, “and they could even sing about it afterwards. Will he who is so strong and gentle be less faithful and gracious to me, weak and cowardly though I am, when it is so obvious that the thing he delights in most of all is to deliver his followers from all their fears and to take them to the High Places?” With this came the thought that the sooner she went with these new guides, the sooner she would reach those glorious High Places.

She stepped forward, looking at the two veiled figures, and said with a courage which she had never felt before, “I will go with you. Please lead the way,” for even then she could not bring herself to put out her hands to grasp theirs.

The Shepherd laughed again and then said clearly, “My Peace I leave with you. My Joy be fulfilled in you. Remember that I pledge myself to bring you to the High Places at the top of these mountains and that you shall not be put to shame and now ‘till the day break and the shadows flee away, I will be like a roe or a young hart on the mountains’” (Can. 2:17).

Then before Much-Afraid could realize what was happening, he had leaped on to a great rock at the side of the path and from there to another and to yet another, swifter almost than her eyes could follow his movements. He was leaping up the mountains, springing from height to height, going on before them until in a moment or two he was lost to sight.

When they could see him no longer, Much-Afraid and her two new companions began to ascend the foothills. It would have been a curious sight, had there been anyone to watch, as Much-Afraid started on her journey, limping toward the High Places, shrinking as far as possible from the two veiled figures beside her, pretending not to see their proffered hands. But there was no one there to see, for if there is one thing more certain than another, it is that the development of hinds’ feet is a secret process, demanding that there should be no onlookers.