Another young lady was called of God to go to India.  Mother was unsaved and seemed to need her help.  But the call of God had to come first; that was unmistakable.  Her Christian friends gave her good advice according to the natural.  They cautioned her that, if she were a real Christian, she would stay at home with her mother.  But the daughter died--died to her own friends and her own good name.  Counted as cruel and unloving, she was with her Master "reckoned among the transgressors." She trod the way of death.  In harmony with the Crucified she went to India.  Her mother was still over on the other side of the Cross, "dead in trespasses and sins:' Calvary had come between daughter and mother.  But this is the divine order.  Calvary not only divides; it draws.  Christ was "set forth crucified" before the mother's eyes.  Referring to Calvary Jesus said: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me." In a practical way Christ crucified was lifted up in that daughter--lifted up afresh to mother.  As Paul puts it: "before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you." Mother saw the Crucified for daughter had been "crucified with Christ." The daughter had her mother in her heart, not to live and die with her, but "to die and live." God honors those who so die to honor Him.  In time this daughter came home on her first furlough and led her mother to Christ.  She saw her fall asleep in Jesus and quietly laid away--and went back in the will of God to India.

Another case.  A prodigal son was determined to "have a fling." His mother was a woman of prayer.  He comforted himself beneath her prayers that he could not get far away.  At length the mother detected a fatal flaw in her own praying.  Her sentiment would save her son from the way of transgressors, which is hard.  She was not in full identification with the spirit of the Cross.  At length she came to have her son in her heart "to die and live" with him.  She warned him: "Son, I'm no longer asking God to protect you or save you from trouble, I am asking Him to get you, dead or alive." Oswald Chambers says: "Whenever we step back from identification with God's interest in others into sympathy with them, the vital connection with God has gone; we have put our sympathy, our consideration for them in the way; 'and this is a deliberate rebuke to God." That son is a missionary in Africa today.  He got afraid of mother's prayers.  Shall I say that "mother died"--died to her own fleshly attachment?  Her son then followed her through the Cross into resurrection-life and service.

In the days of the Scottish Covenanters, in those times before an enervating effeminacy had overtaken our faith, Jane Welsh, the noble daughter of John Knox, was approached by the prison officials with the assurance that her husband, John Welsh, would be freed if only he would renounce the Protestant faith. Gathering up her apron she replied, "Please your majesties, I would rather catch his head there." Our modern sentiment would call her intolerant, dogmatic, un-loving.  But she truly loved God first, and her husband as herself.  She had suffered much for the faith through her husband's imprisonment, but she still had him in her heart to die and live with him.

There is nothing so terrible, nothing so revolutionary as the Cross.  But it is God's place of victory for ourselves and for our relatives--" dying, and, behold we live."