TRUST.
A PICTURE memory brings to me:
I look across the years and see
Myself beside my mother's knee.
I feel her gentle hand restrain
My selfish moods, and know again
A child's blind sense of wrong and pain.
But wiser now, a man gray grown,
My childhood's needs are better known,
My mother's chastening love I own.
Gray grown, but in our Father's sight
A child still groping for the light,
To read his ways and works aright.
I bow myself before his hand;
That pain itself for good was planned
I trust, but cannot understand.
I fondly dream its needs must be;
That as my mother dealt with me
So with his children dealeth He.
I wait, and trust the end will prove
That here and there, below, above,
The chastening heals, the pain is love!
John O. Whittier.