SUPPORT GSPS

The Gold, Silver, Precious Stones team appreciates your contributions in support of this work. Please send your correspondence to:

Gold, Silver, Precious Stones
P.O. Box 240
Harvest, AL 35749

"Last Ministerial Labors and Death," Autobiography of Elder Wilson Thompson ch. 27 (1867)

AUTHOR:

Thomas (Thompson), Mary G.

Dear reader, none but those who have passed through the trial, know the deep emotions of grief which fill the heart when death takes from us a beloved father, when a full sense of the truth that he is gone from us, no more to return forever, is conveyed into the soul. Were there no light beyond the tomb, no ray of immortality to illuminate the gloom of mortality and death, how bitter and inconsolable would our grief be, when the dark curtain of death has shut out forever those dear kindred ones whose lives have so closely been linked in ours that their death is as the rending of our own heartstrings. To look with one fond, long gaze upon the beloved form, to hearken to the last words of affection and love, and to feel that we are to meet no more—no, never! It breaks the springs of life; it is the wretchedness of despair.

But we “sorrow not as those who have no hope.” We feel that our father sleeps in Jesus, that there is but a vail between us, and while we on this side see but dimly, he, within the vail, is beholding the beauties of the paradise of God. We miss him in the family circle; his chair is vacant by the hearth; his voice is no longer heard in council. In the church on earth no more is his great gift enjoyed, proclaiming salvation through Jesus, and ascribing wisdom and power unto our God. But beyond the curtain of mortality, among the spirits of the just made perfect, in the presence of the holy angels, with the blessed Saviour, in the glory of God, made free from pain, from sorrow, from death, he lives, with no cloud to intervene, to hide the beauty of the Lord. There, in strains seraphic, his immortal powers chant the great, the never-ending glories of our Redeemer God. O, with what submission to the will of God can we resign ourselves when grace shows us how excellent the way of the Lord is. Instead of despairing, we press forward toward the prize, and forget the things which are behind.