A Devotion from George Morrison

He split the rocks in the desert and gave them water as abundant as the seas.

—Psalm 78:15

[The psalmist] sees the Israelites crowding around the rock and saying in their hearts, “This cannot last long.” He sees them watching for the supply to fail, as, of course, coming from a rock it must soon do. And then he sees their wild surprise when it dawns on them that the stream is inexhaustible and is fed by channels they know nothing of, from boundless and unfathomable reservoirs. What the people crave for is a drink of water, and God in his mercy gives them their desire. But he fills their cups not from a little cistern but as if from some limitless ocean. And the psalmist knows that that is always true, for whenever the Almighty satisfies his creatures, he gives them drink as abundant as the seas.

Let us think for a moment of God’s ways in providence—in the ordering and discipline of our lives. When we are young our joys are all our own; we never dream that others can have known them. When we are young we take our little sorrows as if there were no such sorrows in the world. And much of the bitterness of childish trial lies in its terrible sense of isolation, in the feeling that in the whole wide world there is no one who has had to suffer just like us. It seems as if God had cut a special channel for us out of which no other life had ever drunk. In joy and in grief, in sunshine and in shadow, we seem to move alone when we are children. But as life advances and our outlook broadens and we learn the stories of the lives around us, then we see that we are not alone but are being made to drink of the great depths. It is not by exceptional providences that we live. It is not by exceptional joys we are enriched. It is not by anything rare or strange or singular that we are fashioned under the hand of God. It is by sorrows that are as old as humanity, by trials that a thousand hearts have felt, by joys that are common as the wind is common that breathes on the palace and on the meanest street. By these things we live; by these we grow—by love and tears, by trials, by work, by death—by the things that link us all into a family, the things that are common to ten thousand hearts. And it is when we come to recognize that truth and to feel our comradeship in a common discipline that we say, as the psalmist said of Israel, he gave us “water as abundant as the seas.”