| Things to Live For |
Chapter 3 |
Page 4 |
One writes:–
“Through all the tumult of this busy life,
So overfull, with such ambitions rife,
There waits a quiet place deep in my heart,
Wherein this restlessness can have no part.
“A quiet place in which my soul can rest;
As rests a weary bird soft in its nest,
Screened from the light by branches bending low,
Safe hidden from the eye of lurking foe.
“No guest is welcomed in this secret place;
No careless thought its holy walls deface;
For here we know that God is very nigh–
We love this quiet place, my soul and I.”
He who understands this has learned one of the inmost secrets of a wholesome life. With the peace of Christ in the heart, even the sorest trials and the bitterest sorrows will not make a life unwholesome; rather the outcome of struggle and suffering will be the promotion of spiritual health. Sorrow rightly endured cleanses the life of its earthliness and its unhealthiness, and leaves it holier and more beautiful. It is pitiful to see people suffer and not grow better – grow worse indeed continually. One writes wisely: “It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we were nothing but our old selves at the end of it; if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of the unknown toward which we have sent forth irrepressible yearnings in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy.” The wholesome use of grief is the putting of its pain into new energy of loving and living.
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