“Even to your old age I am the same, and to your gray hairs I will carry you; I have made you and I will bear; I will carry and I will save.”   Isaiah 46:4

There is no sadder plight than that of a friendless man.  To be alone, not merely in body-that were hard enough – but alone in soul, to meet “face on face in the city, but never the face of a friend,” and to know we could roam the wide world over and never would anyone strike the sudden hand of comradeship in ours, that is bitter isolation indeed.  We need companionship.  God knew this, and God saw that our soul’s strong hunger for sympathy must be fed.  So He left us not alone; in the Garden of Eden He made a help for man like unto himself, and from that moment  man has always dwelt in fellowship with men and in his hours of need has sought their helping presence.

 

But again God looked.  He saw that we might make friends; yes, good and true and loyal friends, yet there would come times when our friends would feel the load of mortal cares themselves, and we would not dare to weight their shoulders more.  He knew that there would be hours, nay, maybe weeks and months and years, when we should sorely need our friends, and they would be far away under other skies or gathered to the world’s great sleeping army beneath the sod.  And the famished eyes met His and He realized that the gaunt soul must not be left to starve.  God saw the need, and as He has always done, God met it, met it and we start and we start at the thought of His love.

Out from the Bosom of the Eternal Father leapt the Eternal Word, and Mary’s Child lies on the straw before us, and Mary’s Boy graces the sordid streets of an Eastern village, and Mary’s Son beckons us on so appealingly as He bows His thorn-crowned Head on the hill of death.  Yes, but how compellingly, how irresistibly does the Prisoner of nineteen hundred years call to us from out the tabernacle of His imprisonment!  The Desired of the Nations has come, and our human hearts have found a human Friend in whom we can all confide.  We are all sick, all infirm, all weak and feeble, and the constant play of light and shadow in our lives wearies us.  We know too surely the end of all, as we daily struggle with death till one day victory be his.  But what of that!  Come clouds, come sunshine, my Friend is with me now.   Never a moment of solitude now;  never a place where there will not be the face of a Friend.  He, “the Keeper of little ones,” will deliver “my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from falling.”  He, the Friend of friends, whose moods I do not have to watch; for “even to your old age I am the same, and to your gray hairs I will carry you; I have made you, and I will bear;  I will carry and I will save.” 

Friend of my younger days, Friend of my maturing years, Friend, too, when life shall ebb into eternity, constant and unswerving in Your love for me, I kneel here to thank You for Your friendship.  You alone know what it means to me;  what it means to realize that there is no sorrow I need hold back from You, no meanness, no cowardice I need hide from You, lest Your shoulder bear not the burden and Your heart be not brave enough to love me still; what it means to know that my coming can never be ill-timed.  Lord Jesus, I am contented now and my weary heart has found its rest.  “Lover of souls, great God, I look to Thee.”

“I never crossed your threshold with a grief but that I went without it, never came Heart-hungry but You fed me, eased the blame, And gave the sorrow solace and relief”