A visiting preacher once stayed in a house of a widow. He’d arrived on the Saturday before he was to preach on the Sunday, and the lady of the house, being that sort of person, had given up her bedroom for the guest. When he got up in the morning he threw back the curtains and looked out on a beautiful scene:
hills way in the distance with a beautiful green pasture in the valley. But he was intrigued to notice that in the comer of the window pane a child-like writing was scratched in the glass. He could just make out the words: ’This is the day’. At breakfast he asked his hostess, was it done by a grandchild who had been playing around with something sharp? “No,” she said. “I did it myself, and I did it with the diamond on my engagement ring.” And then she explained how, having lost her husband some years previously, there were many times when she would
throw open the curtains and not see a beautiful country scene but pouring rain. She would then be plunged into despair and depression, and she would have no wish to go out and face the world. Having lost her life-partner, she felt that meaning had gone.
Then one morning, in a moment of bleak despair, she opened her Bible for her daily reading and saw the words, “This is the day
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