Whatever circumstances we may encounter in life, whatever difficulties may befall us, whatever suffering we may have to pass through, we can have the highest confidence that none of it has come apart from the knowledge and the will of God. As the Catechism says, God “watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.” This truth must have been on De Witt Talmage’s mind when he preached these precious words many years ago…
You may ask me a hundred questions I cannot answer, but I shall until the day of my death believe that I am under the unerring care of God.
The heavens may fall and the world may burn and the judgment may thunder and eternal ages may roll, but not a hair shall fall from my head, not a shadow shall drop on my path, not a sorrow shall transfix my heart without being divinely arranged—arranged by a loving, sympathetic Father.
He bottles our tears, he catches our sorrows. To the orphan he will be a father and to the widow he will be a husband and to the outcast he will be a home and to the most miserable wretch who crawls up out of the ditch in his abomination crying for mercy, he will be an all-pardoning God.
The rocks shall turn gray with age and the forests shall be unmoored in the last hurricane, and the sun shall shut its fiery eyelid and the stars shall drop like blasted figs and the continents shall go down like anchors in the deep and the ocean shall heave its last groan and lash itself with expiring agony and the world shall wrap itself in winding sheets of flame and leap on the funeral pyre of the Judgment Day…
…but God’s love shall not die. It will kindle its suns after all other lights have gone out. It will be a billowing sea after the last ocean has wept itself away. It will warm itself by the fire of a consuming world. It will sing while the archangel’s trumpet is pealing forth and the air is filled with the crash of broken sepulchres and the rush of the wings of the rising dead!
