Of the Pitiful Afflicted

How many are in woeful straits and bodily extremities? How many, in their estates, lack bread, lack clothes, lack housing, lack heat, lack all the necessities that can be? Their bodies are diseased, full of pains, their bodies are deformed. Their very parts of nature are exceedingly loathsome and unfit for service in every way. By all outward appearances, their estates are extremely miserable. Yet, with all this, they are extremely wicked also, extremely sinful.

Go into their houses. There is nothing but poverty and misery there, and there is as much wickedness and iniquity as poverty and misery. It may be that these poor creatures who are this miserable have hearts full of atheism. They live without God in the world; they do not know God. They do not know Christ. They know nothing of their immortal souls. They know nothing of another life. They live just like brute beasts in all filthy uncleanness. It may be that they suffer for their wickedness before men and are whipped, put into the stocks or a cage, lie in dark dungeons in cold, nakedness, and hunger, and all for their sin and wickedness.

~~Jeremiah Burroughs, THE EVIL OF EVILS, ch. 66.

Burroughs speaks of poor souls who are afflicted in this life, who are to be pitied, and yet it is far more pitiful knowing that some may live a life of affliction here, only to be afflicted in hellfire forever for sin.

Today I met a man with Cerebral Palsy. His right arm wasn't all that useful, and his speech was highly impaired. He had been having thoughts of killing himself for about three weeks. His wrist showed evidence of his thoughts, if you catch my meaning. He sobbed, uncontrollably at times, while he spoke of these things to me. He broke my heart. He has trouble getting a job, because people think he's incompetent. He's not incompetent, but the poor man appears that way to some. Strange, I meet enough people throughout any given week who claim some disability that makes them unable (rather, unwilling) to work, who do not have the true disabilities that this man had, and yet here is a fella hitting the streets looking for a job, while many others far more able sit on their lazy behinds, content to collect a free check. Anyway, this poor man... his outward and temporal estate was to be pitied. But to be pitied even more was the fact that though he did believe "there was someone up there," yet he had no particular religious profession. Now, suppose he had succeeded in self-murder. What a sad case this would have been! Outward and temporal afflictions all his life, pressing him to the point of despair, taking his own life, and only to find more and greater afflictions awaiting him! A sad case indeed.

Also sad, this story out of rual Ohio, which immediately reminded me of the Ballad of Hollis Brown.

Do you have something to be thankful for today, dear readers?