Providence has dealt kindly with me as far as illnesses are concerned during my travels through my allotted span. But a recent accident, which required surgery, laid me low in a hospital bed. The experience of pain certainly tested my patience. When lying on one’s back, one wanted to sit up, and when sitting up one wants to lie down. The night is longed for, but when it comes restlessness looks for the dawn. So the cycle continued day by day.

A lesson that is learned is to give one more of a personal sympathy with the afflictions and pains of other people. But also there is a realisation of an identification with the physical hurt of the psalmists, for they trod the same path. And what of Christ, whose soul-sufferings are our salvation, but parallel with them was the excruciating pain and anguish in His body and on the cross.

If a night of interminable pain is reluctantly waited for, what of the eternal experience of darkness and pain of the damned, which has no breaking of the dawn.