“Children of yesterday,
Heirs of tomorrow,
What are you weaving–
Labor and sorrow?
Look to your looms again;
Faster and faster
Fly the great shuttles
Prepared by the Master.
Life’s in the loom:
Room for it–room.”
All life is serous. We are not butterflies, to flutter a little while in the air and then drop into the dust. The words we speak and the things we do are not snow flakes dropping into the water, “a moment white, then gone forever,” but are beginnings of immortalities. We are not done with anything in life as it passes from our hands. Nothing is indifferent. There is a moral character in all that we do. Either we are blessing the world, or sowing the seed of a curse in every influence that goes out from us. It becomes us, therefore, to give conscientious thought to all our life.
In one of his epistles St. Paul has a remarkable passage about working for God. He tells us that God and we are coworkers, and that we can do nothing without him. This is true even in our common affairs. In a little shop on a back street a man makes a mariner’s compass. It is taken on board a great ship, and by means of its trembling needle the vessel is guided over the sea unerringly to its destination. A man made the compass. Yes; a man and God. A man did the mechanical work, put the wonderful instrument together; but it was God who put into the magnet its mysterious power. This illustrates a common law. God and man are coworkers; and without God man can do nothing, while God’s perfect work needs man’s best.
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