"Glimpses of Glory"

While reading a favorite book a few years ago, the following paragraphs jumped off the page and gripped my heart and mind. I found myself captivated with reflections on Jesus my Lord, and the example of my wife Hope. Through my wife more than any other…I have caught “glimpses of HIS glory.”

The context of the following excerpts is Amy Carmichael’s remembrance of a most difficult season of spiritual warfare and life/ministry opposition. She writes more penetrating and poignant than any I’ve read. It affects me similar to my wife’s journals and letters. In the midst of trials…troubles, she tells us of intense perplexities, and “no way of getting advice, for there was no precedent to follow: no one had been this way before---we had crossed an invisible frontier into an unknown land…but, in that land we met our Lord and learned to know HIM…there were (also) little, tender refreshings…infantile things that would have been nothing to the great or strong, but which to us were like a mother’s reassuring touch.”

For all who have been to “that land,” and in gratitude for my wife Hope that has been there with me, I pass on this prophetic encouragement:

“My flesh and my heart faileth”—Let them fail. For “God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.” Has anyone ever been able to tell what our glorious Lord can be to and through a man, woman, or little child whom HE is training to wait upon HIM only?

No one has ever been able to tell it. I search for words like jewels, or stars, or flowers, but I cannot find them. I wish I could, for this book may fall into the hands of someone who has been hindered from caring to know HIM by the dull and formal trapping which our dull and formal thoughts have laid upon HIM—strange disguise for such a radiance. How can I commend my Master? I have not seen HIM yet, but I have caught glimpses!”

Then, after speaking of the emotional separation we all have with other humans that often produces caution or withdrawal from them; she states that in spite of this warning instinct, “Sometimes there is a lovely freedom…each is at home in the other’s rooms. There is a joy in that sense of sureness, in understanding and in being understood. There is joy in the recognition of that which makes it safe to trust to the utmost of the utmost. What makes it so? It is the golden quality of love perfected in strength. That gold is Christ. Or some sharp test takes that friend unawares. You see the life reel under shattered blows; perhaps you see it broken. And you look almost in fear. Thus suddenly discovered, what will appear? And no base metal shows, not even the lesser silver, but only veins and veins of gold. That gold is Christ.

Without HIM, Lover of all lovers, life is dust, With HIM it is like rivers that run among hills, fulfilled with perpetual surprises. He who knows his Lord as Savior and King is taken, as old Richard Rolle declares, into a marvelous mirth, so that he as it were sings his prayers without notes. Life is battle—yes, but it is music. It knows the thrill of brave music, the depths and heights of music. It is life, not stagnation. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed (happy, very happy) is the man or woman that trusteth in HIM.” –quote excerpts from Gold Cord by Amy Carmichael

My wife Hope has both embodied and instructed me in these realities and truths. I pray that everyone who reads this will learn the revelation that “Life is battle---yes, but it is music!”...and put your hope and trust in the Lord. May you wait on the Lord for renewal and so, become an instrument of little refreshings, an understanding soul, a vessel yielded to provide “glimpses of glory!”