My sophomore year in high school, our English teacher introduced our class to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. While most people skipped it altogether or read Cliff Notes, I read every single word. Unbeknownst to my teacher and classmates, my soul had been searching for answers to life’s big questions. Through Milton I found a poetic gateway into the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit began to soften my heart for salvation which would come within the calendar year.

I haven’t thought too much about Milton for the past few years, but I recently happened upon some of his early and late poetry. As I was researching his life, I was reminded that he went blind and lost his first wife in one year at age 44. I teared up thinking about such devastating losses as one who is nearing that age quite quickly. As a writer and one who feels God’s pleasure through reading and writing words, I cannot imagine the confusion and pain his blindness caused him. He must have wondered why God would give him such a gift only to seemingly take it away in the prime of his life .

Thankfully, Milton captured some of his wrestling with these losses poetically in a poem entitled, “When I Consider.’ The poem offers its reader a costly lesson in learning to yield to the Lord in seasons of suffering and waiting.

“When I Consider” John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,
E’re half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, through my Soul more bet
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

Milton honestly expresses his frustration with God using an allusion to the Parable of the Talents wherein we are taught to invest the gifts God has given to us. He poetically asks, “How does God expect me to use my talent when blindness seems to prevent me from doing such?”. In the beginning of the poem, he laments feeling of uselessness and readies himself to bring his questions before the Lord.

Yet, the poem shifts as he realizes, in essence, what Paul said to the men of Athens, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything” (Acts 17: 24–25).

In his compound grief, Milton found peace in learning to bear God’s mild yoke patiently. Yes, God is worshipped by the angels who busily speed at his bidding, but Milton remembers that God is equally pleased by those who bear their suffering in faith and wait upon Him.

Our Yoke-Fellow

We bear the yokes His scarred hands have fashioned for us best when we remember that the One gave us the yoke also bears the yoke with us. The yoke-fashioner is also the yoke-fellow. Jesus’s invitation to the weary and heavy-laden initially strikes me as strange. After all, I would expect an offer for a burden-less, yoke-free life. But he doesn’t present that to his people as an option; rather, he offers a yoke made easy and light thanks to the presence of Himself as yoke-fellow (Matthew 11: 28–30).

Our yokes aren’t the same because our souls aren’t the same, nor are the good works God is actively preparing us that we might we walk into them. So often when suffering comes, our reflexive reaction is to look around at others and compare suffering. But the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians (and us through them) that if we must compare suffering, we ought to compare it to the glory that will far outweigh it (2 Corinthians 4: 16–18).

I don’t know what yoke God is inviting you to learn to bear mildly. I hope it is not Milton’s yoke of blindness and bereavement in the same year. But I do know that if He has sovereignly assigned it to you, He intends to carry it with you. He will be with His people even to the end of the age (Matthew 28: 20). Having loved His own, He loves them to uttermost and to the end (John 13: 1).

When it comes to bearing the yoke, we do best with eyes fixed ahead to the coming glorious rest in His presence when all suffering will cease. If we must look around, let us look to the yoke-fellow always by our side.

Mild bearing will make way for great glory. It did so for Milton, and it will do the same for those who say with the Psalmist, “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning” (Psalm 130: 5–6).

While it is true for all of us that in glory “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is,” it likely meant much more to Milton whose eyes were darkened for most of his adult life (1 John 3: 2).