Our Trysting-Places
There are no chance meetings. We keep tryst. “It is a strange truth of life,” says Stopford Brooke, “that unknowingly we are continually hovering close to our destiny. We think again and again, in the street, at night before sleep attacks us with her envious silence, that perhaps to-day we met, or perhaps to-morrow we shall meet, him or her who will upturn our life and make it new.”
Think of our courtships, for example. Is it not G. K. Chesterton who says that the spectacle of a pair of lovers wandering in a leafy lane is a greater slice of history than the record of a battle? For a battle is a grim story of the past; whilst, as you gaze upon the happy man and maid, you look down the long avenues of future generations. Can anyone believe that our courtships come about by chance? If so, our homes are the temples of chance, our children are the offspring of chance, the race is the creation of chance, and we have expelled God from His own universe.
Yes; that pair of lovers met by appointment, not only in the leafy lane last night, but when they first saw each other’s faces, and felt a tingling consciousness that their destiny had saluted them. Edwin Arnold sings:
Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours
For each lone soul another lonely soul.
Each chasing each through all the weary hours
And meeting strangely at some sudden goal.
Then blend they, like green leaves with golden flowers,
Into one beautiful and perfect whole;
And life’s long night is ended, and the way
Lies open, onward to eternal day.
“A woman cannot find rest,” says Dr. Alexander Whyte, “but in the house of her husband. Knit as her heart is, and will forever be, to her father and to her mother, yet there is a soul somewhere in God’s hand to whom she was knit before she was born, and when God opens His hand twin-soul leaps out to meet twin-soul, and she is married in the Lord.”
—F. W. Boreham.
Two loving hearts in a true home are more capable of making future history than a million soldiers on the battle-field.
Alternate Reading: Acts 5:12-16.