June 13 / Springs in the Valley by L.B. Cowman

June 13

Who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame. (Heb. 12:2)

The joy of the spirit is no cheap joy. It has scars on it—radiant scars! It is joy won out of the heart of pain. Those who know it have found one of life’s deepest and most transforming secrets; the transmuting of pain into a paean. Sorrow becomes not something to escape; we can make it sing. We can set our tears to music, and no music is so exquisite, so compelling. The Christians learned immediately and at once the truth which the philosopher Royce puts in these words: “Such ills we remove only as we assimilate them, take them up into the plan of our lives, give them meaning, set them in their place in the whole.” When their heartstrings were stretched upon some cross of pain and the winds of persecution blew through them, then from this human aeolian harp men heard the very music of God. They did not bear pain, they used it.
SELECTED

Where the rain does not fall we have deserts. When the soil is not torn up by the plow and the harrow we get no crops.

Joy is a rare plant; it needs much rain for its growth and blossoming.

I heard an old farmer talk one day, 

Telling his listeners how 

In the wide, new country far away 

The rainfall follows the plow. 

“As fast as they break it up, you see, 

And turn the heart to the sun, 

As they open the furrow deep and free 

And the tillage is begun, 

The earth grows mellow, and more and more 

It holds and sends to the sky 

A moisture it never had before, 

When its face was hard and dry. 

And so wherever the plowshares run 

The clouds run overhead, 

And the soil that works and lets in the sun 

With water is always fed.” 

I wonder if that old farmer knew 

The half of his simple word, 

Or guessed the message that, heavenly true, 

Within it was hidden and heard. 

It fell on my ear by chance that day, 

But the gladness lingers now, 

To think it is always God’s dear way 

That the rainfall follows the plow. 

Endure with faith and courage through the frost, and you will see a glorious spring.

Cowman, L. B. E.. Springs in the Valley (pp. 178-179). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.