Many years ago, my friend Dr. Mark Dever, Senior Pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, shared this moving quotation with me from the hand of the great English Baptist minister William Kiffin, writing in 1682, of the death of his beloved wife Hanna.
“It pleased the Lord to take to Himself, my dear and faithful wife, with whom I had lived nearely forty-two years; whose tenderness to me, and faithfulness to God, were such as cannot, by me, be expressed, as she constantly sympathised with me in all my afflictions. I can truly say, I never heard her utter the least discontent under all the various providences that attended either me or her; she eyed the hand of God in all our sorrows, so as constantly to encourage me in the ways of God: her death was the greatest sorrow to me that ever I met with in the world.”
It was a blessing to me, and I have used it many times in Christian funerals, and to comfort bereaved husbands. I trust it encourages you as well.