When You Were Absent

4

If Christ learned obedience by suffering, surely our suffering should be more than His. If God spared not His own Son, can we expect Him to spare his joint-heirs? Christ had the capacity to suffer more than we. God who weighs our paths, knows what we can take, and I do not believe He gives us more than we can manage, nor does He give it to us from any sadistic enjoyment in our suffering. I may punish my little son more than he can bear, for I am human. To strengthen him in responsibility, I may give him an unequal burden, for I cannot measure his little mind. I can only test him by trial. God tests us fully knowing us. We may trust Him, let us look to ourselves. Here was I, at the beginning of a war with a boy of 6, a daughter of 4 and a baby of three months. We had stayed in Hong Kong at our own responsibility. We were privileged to go to America at our own expense. This we could not well afford on a British salary. We might go to Australia at government expense, but frankly we did not want to go there-so we stayed in Hong Kong and hoped we might go with my husband if and when the time of necessity came. It seemed the right decision at the time. Here were we, and I could only pray to my Father in Heaven, "We have come to you as to our Father. We claim you as our Father. We belong to your household and we will try to obey your laws. Will you not take care of us? I know you will take care of us for we are yours and there is no one else to care for us. Our daddy has gone, his company is not responsible for us, the government is not responsible for us, I am not interested now in anything but leading these children through the bombs." The bombs! They began to fall on Monday, December 8th, 1941. We lived below a hill of "big guns" and the airplanes were out to silence them. My Norwegian children were taken to a safer place and we were invited, but I felt I could not go because there was no room there for my cook, his wife and their three children, the oldest of whom was three. They were Northerners and had no home in South China. The Air Raid Warden came and

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