Little know we what sorrow may be upon the
sea at this moment. We are safe in our quiet chamber, but far away on
the salt sea the hurricane may be cruelly seeking for the lives of men.
Hear how the death fiends how among the cordage; how every timber
starts as the waves beat like battering rams upon the vessel! God help
you, poor drenched and wearied ones! My prayer goes up to the great Lord
of sea and land, that he will make the storm a calm, and bring you to
your desired haven! Nor ought I to offer prayer alone, I should try to
benefit those hardy men who risk their lives so constantly.
Have I ever
done anything for them? What can I do? How often does the boisterous sea
swallow up the mariner! Thousands of corpses lie where pearls lie deep.
There is death-sorrow on the sea, which is echoed in the long wail of
widows and orphans. The salt of the sea is in many eyes of mothers and
wives. Remorseless billows, ye have devoured the love of women, and the
stay of households. What a resurrection shall there be from the caverns
of the deep when the sea gives up her dead! Till then there will be
sorrow on the sea. As if in sympathy with the woes of earth, the sea is
for ever fretting along a thousand shores, wailing with a sorrowful cry
like her own birds, booming with a hollow crash of unrest, raving with
uproarious discontent, chafing with hoarse wrath, or jangling with the
voices of ten thousand murmuring pebbles. The roar of the sea may be
joyous to a rejoicing spirit, but to the son of sorrow the wide, wide
ocean is even more forlorn than the wide, wide world. This is not our
rest, and the restless billows tell us so. There is a land where there
is no more sea—our faces are steadfastly set towards it; we are going to
the place of which the Lord hath spoken. Till then, we cast our sorrows
on the Lord who trod the sea of old, and who maketh a way for his
people through the depths thereof.
This devotion was taken from The Apostle's Bible app.
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