MEDLAND, Van Donald d: 1905

MEDLAND

Posted By: Marilyn O'Connor (email)
Date: 11/11/2008 at 13:33:07

Osage News
March 9, 1905

MEDLAND

Van Donald Medland born December 18, 1901; died Feb. 28, 1905.

The streets of the beautiful city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.
The angel of death never seems so sullen as when he bears away the soul of a little child.

Those who remain look out into the future with beating hearts in silence. If we look upon the world, however, not as a mere workshop or playground, but as a schoolroom, where the Father God is seeking to teach all his children, and where death is but the promotion, we may almost rejoice when a little child falls asleep.

Looking upon life therefore as a great school, a light is thrown upon that which seems so terrible to us on earth, the sad and awful mystery of a child's death. But what is it when a child dies?.

A sweet-hearted lover of children has declared that a child's death is the call of the great Head-Master promoting that child into his own room, away from all the under-teachers to finish his education under his own eyes at his feet.

The whole thought of a child's growth and development in heaven instead of here on earth, is one of the most exciting and bewildering on which the mind can rest. Always the child must be in the streets of the "beautiful city."
Always there must be something in those who died as chldren to make them different to all eternity from those who grew up to be men here among all the temptations and hindrances of earth.

For this dear boy, therefore, there will forever be something in his perfect trust in the Father-God, something in the peculiar nearness and innocent familarity of his life with Jesus, something in the instinctiveness and simplicity of his relation to the truth, that will be denied to those of who laid his precious form to rest.

Van was a peculiarly sweet and lovable child. Instinct with vitality and aboundable life, yet obedient and affectionate, he won the hearts of even a casual acquaintance. The sorrow and the longing of the mother and grand-parents cannot be measured.