Derek Cook > Recent Status Updates

You must be filled with expectancy. You must be awash in hope.

Wax scents, damp stones, empty pews. I pictured the faces that had filled each one…I stood there, willing a prayer to form for them. But nothing came.

Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss. Each one of you has cried for the crop blighted by drought or pest. Cried, as you did what you knew you must, and ploughed each plant under, so that the soil could be renewed in the hope of the better season coming. Cry now, my friends, but hope also! For a better season will follow this time…trust in God!

God warned us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother’s heart such a fierce passion for her babies that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.

These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can’t say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moths wing in the dark.