How will it be there?

We serve God quite as much by active work as by special prayer, here, I said after some thought—how will it be there? We must be busily at work certainly—but I think there must naturally be more communion with Him then. Now, this phrase communion with God has been worn, and not always well worn. Prayer means to us, in this life, more often penitent confession than happy interchange of thought with Him. It is associated, too, with aching limbs and sleepy eyes, and nights when the lamp goes out. Obstacles, moral and physical, stand in the way of our knowing exactly what it may mean in the ideal of it. My best conception of it lies in the friendship of the man Christ Jesus. I suppose he will bear with him, eternally, the humanity which he took up with him from the Judean hills. I imagine that we shall see him in visible form like ourselves, among us, yet not of us—that he, himself, is Gott mit ihnen—that we shall talk with him as a man talketh with his friend. Perhaps, bowed and hushed at his dear feet, we shall hear from his own lips the story of Nazareth, of Bethany, of Golgotha, of the chilly mountains where he used to pray all night long for us—of the desert places where he hungered—of his cry for help—think, Mary—His!—when there was not one in all the world to hear it, and there was silence in heaven, while angels strengthened him and man forsook him. Perhaps—his voice—the very voice which has sounded whispering through our troubled life. Could ye not watch one hour? shall unfold its perplexed meanings—shall make its rough places plain—shall show us step by step the merciful way by which he led us to that hour—shall point out to us, joy by joy, the surprises that he has been planning for us, just as the old father in the story planned to sur prise his wayward boy come home. And such a communion, which is not too much, nor yet enough, to dare to expect of a God who was the friend of Abraham, who walked with Enoch, who did not call fishermen his servants—such will be that presence of God that adoration, on which we have looked from afar off with despairing eyes that wept, they were so dazzled, and turned themselves away as from the thing they greatly feared.