| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 10 |
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In business relations, too, and in social life, we are cross makers. We are not easy to get along with. We are domineering and inconsiderate. We drive hard bargains. We disappoint people who trust us. We borrow and do not repay. We promise and do not keep our promises. We pledge friendship and do not prove loyal. We accept confidential communications and then violate honour by repeating them. We receive favours and then return unkindness. We are helped over hard places and through difficulties, perhaps at great cost to our friends, and then forget.
We need to remind ourselves how much harder some of us make life for others by crosses we lay on them, whether in what we say or do, or in what we fail to say or do. One of Mr. Lincoln’s sayings was, “Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who know me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.” One of the most pathetic words of Charles Lamb’s is a wish he uttered, as he thought of the way he had so often laid a cross on his mother’s heart – “What would I not give,” he said, “to call my mother back to earth for one day, to ask her pardon, on my knees, for all those acts by which I gave her gentle spirit pain!” Every one has a cross of his own to carry, but ours should never be the hand that shapes the load that shall weigh down another life.
Then there are crosses that God gives us to bear. Jesus spoke of his cross as a cup which the Father had put into his hand. Into every life come experiences clearly sent by God. The human and divine are so mingled in many of the events of our days that we cannot tell where the human ends and the divine begins. We need not try, however, to separate the threads, for God uses human event, even men’s sins, in working out his purposes. Yet there are crosses which God lays upon us. When death comes into your home, and one you love more than life lies still and silent among the flowers, you say God did it. There are many events in our lives for which we can find no human cause. There is immeasurable comfort, however, in the truth that this is God’s world, and that nothing ever gets out of our Father’s hand. We need never be afraid of the crosses God lays upon us.
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