May 15 / Streams in the Desert by L.B. Cowman

Streams in the Desert

But now, the sun cannot be looked at – it is bright in the skies – after a wind passed and swept the clouds away.—Job 37:21 The world owes much of its beauty to cloudland. The unchanging blue of the Italian sky hardly compensates for the changefulness and glory of the clouds. Earth would become a wilderness apart from their ministry. There are clouds in human life, shadowing, refreshing, and sometimes draping it in blackness of night; but there is never a cloud without its bright light. “I do set my bow in the cloud!” If we could see the clouds from the other side where they lie in billowy glory, bathed in the light they intercept, like heaped ranges of Alps, we should be amazed at their splendid magnificence. We look at their under side; but who shall describe the bright light that bathes their summits and searches their valleys and is reflected from every pinnacle of their expanse? Is not every drop drinking in health-giving qualities, which it will carry to the earth? O child of God! If you could see your sorrows and troubles from the other side; if instead of looking up at them from earth, you would look down on them from the heavenly places where you sit with Christ; if you knew how they are reflecting in prismatic beauty before the gaze of Heaven, the bright light of Christ’s face, you would be content that they should cast their deep shadows over the mountain slopes of existence. Only remember that clouds are always moving and passing before God’s cleansing wind. —Selected “I cannot know why suddenly the storm  Should rage so fiercely round me in its wrath;  But this I know—God watches all my path,  And I can trust. “I may not draw aside the mystic veil  That hides the unknown future from my sight,  Nor know if for me waits the dark or light;  But I can trust. “I have no power to look across the tide,  To see while here the land beyond the river;  But this, I know—I shall be Gods forever;  So I can trust.”