| Things to Live For |
Chapter 16 |
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Jesus, when about to leave this world, committed his disciples into the hands of his Father, asking him to keep them in the world’s danger and trial. So may the dying parent commit his children, whom he must leave alone, into the hands of God. We may commit our unfinished work into the same hands when we have to drop it from our feeble clasp. We may commit into Christ’s hands also the loved ones for whom we pray, for whose salvation our hearts cry out with such agony of love. Long may the answer to our supplications seems to be delayed; but we may still trust – laying our pleading in the hands which the nails pierced on the cross of the world’s redemption. We may lay every anxious thought and wish, everything that to us seems hopeless, everything that seems to have failed, everything that causes us pain or care or sorrow – we may lay everything in the hands of Christ, and leave it there, with the faith of a little child. These broken things, these mere fragments of efforts and attainments and achievements and shattered hopes, – all we may entrust to the great Master of life knowing that nothing shall be lost.
“A broken song–it had dropped apart
Just as it left the singer’s heart,
And was never whispered upon the air,
Only breathed into the vague ‘Somewhere.’
“A broken prayer–only half said
By a tired child at his trundle bed;
While asking Jesus his soul to keep,
With parted lips he fell fast asleep.
“A broken life–hardly half told
When it dropped the burden it could not hold.
Of these lives and songs and prayers half done,
God gathers the fragments, every one.”
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