John 20

Supposing

Supposing him to be the gardener. John 20:15

Supposing is a great game. Big people have games they play, but none of them equals the children's one of supposing. A lonely child can play it best, a poor child may play it splendidly, and a child possessing everything he can wish can play it too.

Poor children and rich children suppose pretty much the same things. Join a company of children who have everything they want. Then go and watch the game played by poor children. The one company is as happy as the other. If there is any difference the poor children have the greater gift of supposing.

Listen to how Robert Louis Stevenson writes about a party of children playing this very game.

Bring the comb and play upon it!

Marching, here we come!

Willie cocks his Highland bonnet,

Johnnie beats the drum.

Mary Jane commands the party,

Peter leads the rear;

Feet in time, alert and hearty,

Each a Grenadier!

All in the most martial manner

Marching double quick;

While the napkin like a banner

Waves upon the stick!

Here's enough of fame and pillage,

Great commander Jane!

Now that we've been round the village,

Let's go home again.

The Heavenly Father provides for the happiness of His children. It is He who has taught them this game. Aren't they happy when they play it! A little slum girl was found amusing herself on a door-step with a wisp of straw tied in the middle with a piece of string. Someone asked her what it was. “That's my dolly,” she answered. “But what is the string for?” “ That's my dolly's sash.”

Surely it is a loving Father who makes a child find joys, not excelled by anything even in a royal palace, out of a wisp of straw and a piece of string.

Once I watched a little girl the daughter of a doctor nursing a broken doll very carefully. “Dolly had to have her leg amputated,” she informed me. “That is the surgeon,” she said, pointing to a doll leaning against a toy bed. “The night nurse has fallen asleep,” she added, pointing to another a dilapidated- looking figure with hanging head, which had been placed on a chair. “She has not had a wink of sleep not a wink.”

Lady Henry Somerset tells how, in a hospital, she saw the doctors changing a plaster cast which held a crippled boy's limb. It was a painful operation, yet the little sufferer never winced. All the time he made an unusual buzzing sound with his mouth. After the doctors left, she said to him, “How could you stand it?” “That's nothin',” he answered; “why I just make believe that a bee was stingin' me. Bees don't hurt much. And I kept buzzin' because I was afraid I'd forget about its bein' a bee.”

When Stevenson was a little boy he was very delicate. His nurse taught him the 23rd Psalm. He pictured it all to himself. The “pastures green” were stubble-fields near his own home; “death's dark vale,” a certain archway in a cemetery not far off. These pictures remained with him all his life.

The worst of it is that we seem to suppose less and less as we grow older. Boys and girls, hold on to your supposing. If you are good it will bring beautiful thoughts to your minds.

And God will help you with your supposing if you ask Him. He will not only help you with your supposing: He will make you feel sure that certain things are true. He is training us for a world that we cannot see. And He will tell us things in wonderful ways. Where our supposing ends, God will step in and make us feel that we know.

Mary supposed Jesus to be a gardener. She thought her Master was dead. She was not far wrong in her supposing after all. Jesus is the Gardener of our lives. He tends and cares for us, His plants. And we can repay His care by growing day by day more lovely in character, more beautiful in heart.