| Things to Live For |
Chapter 16 |
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We may also entrust our life itself to the same keeping. Circumstances are but incidents; the real thing about us always is our life itself. The house is not the family. Fire may destroy the building, but the household life is not affected thereby. The body is not the life. Sickness may waste the beauty and the strength, or accident may wound or scar the flesh; but the life within, that which thinks, feels, loves, suffers, wills, and aspires, remains unharmed. It matters little what becomes of our money, our clothes, our house, our property, or even of our personal happiness; but it is of infinite importance what happens to our life itself. The problem of living in this world is to pass through life’s vicissitudes without being harmed by them, growing ever into more and more radiant and beautiful life, whatever our circumstances and experiences may be.
It is in this phase of our living that we most of all need Christ. We cannot escape meeting temptation; but we are so to meet it as not to be hurt by it, coming from it rather with new strength and new radiancy of soul. We cannot find a path in which no sorrow shall come into our life, but we are to pass through sorrow without having our life marred by it. None but Christ can keep us thus unhurt amid the manifold perils through which we must move continually. The gentlest, purest, strongest mother cannot fold her child in her bosom so securely that it will be absolutely safe from the world’s power of evil.
Few thoughts are more serious than that of the responsibility under which we come when we take another life into our hands. A baby is born, and laid in the mother’s arms. In its feebleness it says to her in its first cry, “Into thy hands I commit my life. Guard and keep me. Teach me my lessons. Train my powers. Hide me from the world’s harm. Prepare me for life and for eternity.” Yet any mother who thinks at all knows that she herself cannot do all this for her child.
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