VANDIVIER, Kenneth Vernon

In Memoriam.

Kenneth Vernon Vandiver [sic], son of Arie and Josie Vandiver [sic], died at his home in Bud, March 8, 1895. He had passed his seventh birthday, just merging into youthful boyhood, a bud taken from earth to bloom in heaven. For the past three years, he had been a sufferer from white swelling in the hip, the result of a fall. He bore the lin­gering disease with courage and manliness, with never a word of pain or sorrow, but with always a smile for the brighter side of life, rather than with hopeless despondency. He realized a God and a Heaven his future home. He was an affectionate son, a devoted and kind brother, a sympathetic nephew and a near and dear grandchild.

The family cord is severed never to be united. No one can fill his place. The chair, the hat on the rack, the broken toy and the ragged book are only memories of the happier things. We pine because we have loved. The prick of the thorn is deep because our grasp of the flower was so tight. Not in the first shock of parting is our suffering keenest, but as we move on over the solitary way, each sight, each sound calls up a fresh memory that sad­dens the new sadness, even while the sadness sweetens the old sweetness. A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is rem­embering the happier things, and the memory of the happier things is one of God’s peculiar gifts that comes only to him who experiences sorrow. Every trial, like every enjoyment, has its special lesson to the child of God, but what that lesson is, does not always appear on the surface. Therefore, it is that when a trial comes to us or we come to a trial, it behooves us to con­sider the practical teaching of that trial, as bearing on our personal lives in the service of Him who permitted or ordained it.

Link to Kenneth Vernon Vandivier’s grave

Submitted by Mark McCrady and Cathea Curry