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In traveling to California we passed over hundreds of miles of the dreariest desert. The hot sands glowed and burned under the sun’s rays. Rain scarcely ever falls, and nothing grows on the arid wastes save low, straggling sage bush and wild cacti. On and on our train rolled, hour after hour, amid alkali dust and unrelieved desolation. At length, however, we began to pass into the first fringes of luxuriance, and soon we were in the midst of the garden splendors of Southern California, – flowers, fragrance, and fruit, masses of roses and flowers of all kinds, orange groves, and clumps of ornamental trees, vineyards, and palms. In an hour we had left behind us the desert of the plains, and had entered the richest garden luxuriance of the world.
Is it not so with many a Christian life in leaving this world for heaven? Here are struggles, strifes, trials, bitter tears, disappointments, injustices, wrongs, hardships and cares. Life seems all desert to these toilers. No springs of water burst up in the way to refresh them. Nothing grows in the hot fields to be food for their hunger.
What must heaven be to these weary ones, when they enter it, leaving forever behind them the dreary desolation of this world? In an hour they will pass from the heat, strife, and bitterness of earthly sorrow into the blessedness, the perfect love, the unbroken joy of heaven.