| Things to Live For |
Chapter 24 |
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Life hereafter will not be so different from life here as we sometimes imagine it will be. We shall go on with the living in the other world very much as if nothing had happened. Dying is and experience we need not trouble ourselves much about if we are true believers in Christ. There is a mystery about it; but when we have passed through it we shall probably find that it is a natural and very simple event, perhaps but little more serious than sleeping over night and waking in the morning. It will not hurt us in any way. It will not blot out any beautiful thing in our life. It will end nothing that is worth while. The things we have loved here, we shall continue to love. The things we have learned to do well, we shall probably continue to do, at least in some form. Dying is just going out to test our learning here, and to live out our lessons. As Robert Browning says:–
“I go to prove my soul!
I see my was as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive: what time, what circuit first
I ask not; In some time–
His good time–
I shall arrive;
He guides me and the birds.”
It is intensely interesting to think of life as immortal – stretching on forever. Dying is not a boundary, but merely an incident in the way. We can plan for work that will go on for a thousand years – for ten thousand years. Life here is short even at the longest. We cannot finish in threescore and ten years the great things we dream of in our best moods. Then, only comparatively a few lives reach this full limit of age. It is but a little that we can do in our short, broken years. We begin things, and we are interrupted in the midst of them. Before they are half finished we are called away to something else, or laid aside by illness or our life ends, and the work remains incomplete. It is pathetic, when a busy man has been called away suddenly, to go into his office, his study, or his place of work, and see the unfinished things he has left, – the letter half written, the book half read, the column of figures half added up, the picture begun but not completed. Life is full of fragments, the mere beginnings of things. If there were nothing beyond death, little could come of this poor fragmentary living and doing. But when we know that life will go on without serious break through endless years, it puts a new meaning into every noble and worthy beginning. Every right and good thing, how ever small it may seem, shall live forever.
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