Streams in the Desert April 11 Daily Devotional

What I tell you In the darkness, speak ye in the light (Matt. 10:27).
Our Lord Is constantly taking us into the dark, that He may tell us things. Into the dark of the shadowed home, where bereavement has drawn the blinds; into the dark of the lonely, desolate life, where = infirmity doses us in from the fight and stir of life; into the dark or some crushing sorrow and disappointment
Then He tells us His secrets, great and wonderful, eternal and
Infinite; He causes the eye which has become dazzled by the glare of the earth to behold the heavenly constellations; and the ear to detect the undertones of His voice, which is often drowned amid the tumult of earth's strident cries.
But such revelations always imply a corresponding responsibility- "that speak ye in the fight-that proclaim upon the housetops."
We are not meant to always finger in the dark, or stay in the closet presently we shall be summoned to take our place in the rush and storm of fife; and when that moment comes, we are to speak and proclaim what we have learned.
This gives new meaning to suffering, the saddest element in which Is often its apparent aimlessness. "How useless I am!"
"What am I doing for the betterment of men?" "Wherefore this waste of the precious spikenard of my soul?"
Such are the desperate laments of the sufferer. But God has a purpose in it all. He has withdrawn His child to the higher altitudes of fellowship, that he may hear God speaking face to face, and bear the message to his fellows at the mountain foot
Were the forty days wasted that Moses spent on the Mount or the period spent at Horeb by Elijah, or the years spent in Arabia by Paul?
There is no short cut to the fife of faith, which is the all-vital condition of a holy and victorious life. We must have periods of lonely meditation and fellowship with God. That our souls should have their mountains of fellowship, their valley of quiet rest beneath the shadow of the great rock, their nights beneath the stars, when darkness has veiled the material and silenced the stir of human fife, and has opened the view of the infinite and eternal, is as indispensable as that our bodies should have food.
Thus alone can the sense of God's presence become the fixed possession of the soul, enabling it to say repeatedly, with the Psalmist "Thou art near, 0 God." --F. B. Meyer.
Some hearts, like evening primroses, open more beautifully in the shadows of life.