God’s Free Grace Glorified (9)

It is quiet for a few moments. Mina then stretches out her right hand to her brother and says, “Farewell, my dear brother.” She wishes to say more but is unable. She is much too weak.

Several moments later, the doctor comes upstairs and asks her, “How is it going, Miss Middel?”

With a weak voice Mina answers, “Good, but with my body it is not as good as this morning.”

Rev. Middel has taken the doctor aside and asked him, “She would like to sit in her recliner. Do you think it would tire her out too much?”

The doctor turns to the dying young girl and asks her, “Would you like to sit in your chair, Miss Middel?” She nods her head to indicate yes. “Go ahead and do it,” the doctor says. He sees that he can no longer be of any help, and he leaves.

When he is gone, the minister asks, “Would you like Father to carry you to the recliner, Mina?”

She answers, “Please, Father.”

Carefully she is lifted out of her bed and gently placed in the chair. There she sits. She looks at all of them as if she wishes to say something to each one, but that is no longer possible. She sits this way for a few minutes, then her head bends forward.

“Oh…Lord…” These words are spoken with a cracking voice. Her eyes are closed, only her lips are still moving a bit.

“Here comes the end,” says her friend with an anxious voice.

Her father presses a kiss upon the cheek of his dying girl; then her mother follows, and also her brother, and her friend…

Just a few more minutes and her breathing becomes shallower, in short, unequal breaths. They are all waiting for the final moment. Then Mina takes her final breath. There are no bodily movements; there is no evidence of a death sweat. Mina dies as if she is going to sleep.

Her father breaks the silence by saying, “There goes her soul carried by the angels into heaven to abide there in glory eternally.”

In the same month in which his daughter died in February 1854, Rev. Middel wrote a small booklet about the suffering and dying of his child, Anna Hermina.

As a true preacher, he could not refrain from writing on the last page:

“Oh, that the unconverted, and among them especially the young people, may learn about the vanity of all that is of the world as seen in the blessed dying of my daughter. How often have you tried to turn a deaf ear to the knocking of Christ upon your heart? Oh, how short will be your time here below, how uncertain when time for you will come to an end!

“I pray that you may be instructed by means of this death and realize the blessed privilege that is experienced if your poor soul may be made free in and through Christ.

“Oh, that salvation-seeking souls may be encouraged to continue to call upon the Lord as the faithful fulfiller of His promises, who never forsakes the work which His hands have begun.

“Oh, come with all of your troubles to the precious and most beloved Lord Jesus. By renewal it has become visible in the blessed dying of my beloved daughter that the Lord is gracious and merciful, and has compassion toward miserable and wretched ones in themselves. Ah, keep on calling and your soul shall live.

“And you, confirmed covenant people, extol God’s grace who has again manifested His love and faithfulness.

“Oh, that we, in the strength of the Lord, as strangers in this Mesech here below, strive more against everything which comes against the blessed exercises of communion with God, to live more in the mediate fruits of the covenant of salvation and peace with God, and in the revelation of His precious attributes.

“The strife is for but a short time. Ah, that we then may live in peace with God so that we may soon blessedly be taken up into glory, and there sing eternally with the delivered of God the song of Moses and the Lamb.”

(This installment marks the end of this series.)

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