Joy is sorrow overcome.”

As she listened Grace and Glory remembered the long, bitter, and difficult journey which she herself had made up to the High Places when Sorrow and Suffering had been her companions, and the “long night of sorrow” had seemed sometimes as though it would never end. As she recalled that journey she thought that never had she heard so lovely a song or understood the glorious truth that joy is sorrow overcome and transformed.

“If other nights of sorrow must come to me,” she said to herself, “I can never fear nor dread them again, for I know they are only the seasons when the camphire bushes of the King are prepared and made ready to produce the oil of gladness. Oh, how lovely his thoughts and his plans are, how great is his wonderful goodness and loving-kindness. His ways of grace past finding out! Oh, that I may always react to sorrow in such a way that it will be overcome and be changed into his joy.” Here and there on the slopes grew great spreading trees, and in the shade of one of these the two sat down and began to talk together.

From the Mountain of Camphire they could look out on the dazzlingly white peaks of the still Higher Places and could see the summit of the Black Mountain just appearing above the clouds and mist. And once again the contrast between the joy and the beauty of the slopes on which they were sitting and the desolation of the ruined mountain opposite struck Grace and Glory with a sensation of almost unbearable pity and pain.

As though he read her very thoughts and spoke in answer to them, she heard the voice of the King saying:

“Grace and Glory, have you ever thought of what joy it is to me to be a Savior? To be able to take something which has been marred and spoiled and ruined by evil and to produce out of it something lovely and good and enduring—something which can never again be spoiled? No cost can possibly be too great in order to accomplish such a triumph as that. Whatever the price, love will pay it exultantly and with ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory.’”

As he spoke he looked across at the charred black summit of the mountain opposite as it just appeared above the clouds of swirling mist and his whole face was alight with a glory of love and joy impossible to describe. Presently he began to sing another of the mountain songs, and in the words and the melody there was such a blending of sorrow and of joy that Grace and Glory sat as though lost in wondering awe.

The cry of all distorted things:

“Why hast thou made us thus?

To bear the anguish which life brings;

Why didst thou not love us?”

So marred that God himself must weep—

Fit only for the rubbish heap.