| Things to Live For |
Chapter 1 |
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There are things which are worth while. A man spends his seventy years in lowly Christian life. He fears God, and walks after God’s commandments. He makes no marked success according to the world’s rating. He is even spoken of by others with a sort of pity, as a man who never has been successful. Yet all the while he has lived honestly and faithfully in his place. While other men have been fighting for position, scrambling for honor, thinking meanwhile only of self, he has been giving out his life in generous love, serving others, doing good. He has not gotten on in the world, and his hands are empty at the last.
But there is a success which is not measured by the standards of the business world. There is an invisible sphere in which values are not rated by dollars and cents, but by their moral character. In that sphere a cup of cold water given to a thirsty one in the name of Christ will count for more than the piling of a fortune for self. Hence it is, that a man who has seemed unsuccessful, but nevertheless has been doing good all the while in Christ’s name, living unselfishly, has really achieved a success which lifts his name to high honor.
Sometimes in the country you will see an old water wheel outside of a mill. The water fills its buckets, and all day long it turns round and round in the sunshine. It seems to be working in vain. You see nothing that it is doing by its constant notion. But its shaft runs through the wall; and within the mill it turns the stones which grind the wheat, and the bolts which prepare the flour for the bread that feeds hundreds, or runs the looms which weave the fabrics that keep many warm in winter. There are lives which with all their ceaseless toiling seem to be accomplishing nothing; and yet they reach through the veil into the sphere of the unseen, and there they make blessing and benefit whose value is incalculable.
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