| Things to Live For |
Chapter 20 |
Page 4 |
The world offers attractive things, – pleasures, gains, promises of honor and delight. To the eye of sense these appear to be life’s best things. But too often they enfold bitterness and hurt, the fruit of evil. At the bottom of the cup are dregs of poison. On the other hand, the things that God gives appear sometimes unattractive, undesirable, even repulsive. We shrink from accepting them. But they enfold, in their severe and unpromising form, the blessings of divine love.
We know how true this is of life’s pains and sorrows. Though Grievous to sense, they leave in the heart that receives them with faith and trust the fruits of good. Whatever our burden may be, it is God’s gift, and brings to us some precious thing from the treasury of divine love. This fact makes it sacred to us. Not to accept it is to thrust away from us a blessing sent from heaven.
We need, therefore, to treat most reverently the things in our life which we call burdens. We cherish the gift of a friend. We do not thrust it form us, or fling it away. If we were to find today, lying in the street, trampled under foot, something which we had given a dear one yesterday, a gift of our love, we should be sorely hurt by the dishonor thus put upon us. Shall we treat our heavenly Father’s gift to us with a disregard we would not show to a human friend’s gift? Shall we weary of it? Shall we consider it an evil, something we would be rid of? If it brings present pain or trial, or comes in the form of a cross, shall we complain of its weight? Shall we not rather look upon it with love, and cherish it with gladness, as a mark of honor bestowed upon us?
Here is a quotation from a distinguished preacher which illustrates the esteem in which all true men hold gifts of love: “I have in my house a beautiful half bust, a figure of myself, sculptured from the purest Carrara marble by one who, though not well known as such, is no mean artist. It was a gift tome from the sculptor; but I value it all the more because it was fashioned by the plastic fingers of my own daughter, chiseled wither own hands, and wrought out as an expression of an abiding love, when I was thousands of miles away from home for a long stretch of time. Coming to me on my return home as a gift from her, that bit of marble, the work of my own child’s fingers, and the suggestion of her genius and love, was more precious to me than if Michael Angelo or Phidias had risen from the dead from the dead from Greece or Rome to have wrought that portrait for me.”
Page 4