| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 16 |
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The next item in this programme for a day is the seeking of divine guidance. “Cause me to know the way wherein I should walk.” We cannot find the way ourselves. The path across one little day seems a very short one, but, short as it is, it is tangled and obscure, and we cannot find it ourselves. An impenetrable mist covers the field of the sunniest day, as well as that of a moonless and starless night. When clouds are hanging over you, you ask guidance. You pray when you are in trouble, but in happy times and when all things are going well with you, it does not seem to you that you need help and guidance. Yet you really know no more of the way through the bright days than through the dark nights. When one is walking in a forest and sees a little path turn away from the main road, he does not know whither that path will take him if he follows it. So we know not what the plan we are considering, the business venture we are entering upon, the friendship we are just forming, will mean to us in the next ten, twenty, fifty years. We need divine guidance every inch of the way. Our steps, unguided, though now starting among flowers may lead us into bogs, thorns, and darkness. We need every morning to pray this prayer, “Cause me to know the way wherein I should walk.”
Then God will always find some way to direct us. He guides us by his word. He guides us through our conscience. “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” He guides us also through the counsel and influence of human friends. He guides us by his providence. Sometimes this guidance is very strange. One said the other day, in great distress, “A year ago I was in trouble, and I prayed to God most earnestly to help me. Instead of this, he has let the trouble grow worse through all the year.” But God is not yet through answering this prayer. His guidance has not reached its conclusion. This deepening of the mystery, this increasing of the pain, this extending of the trouble – have you thought that that is part of God’s way of answering your prayer and helping you?
If Joseph, the morning he left home to go to find his brothers, prayed, “Cause me to know the way wherein I should walk today,” he would have wondered, on his way to Egypt as a captive, whether that was really the answer to his morning prayer. It certainly did not seem that it could be. He would probably have wondered why God had not heard his request. But as years went on, Joseph learned that there had been no mistake in that guidance. If he had escaped from the caravan on the way he would only have spoiled one of God’s thoughts of love for him. When we pray in the morning that God will show us the way, we may take the guidance with implicit confidence.
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