| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 16 |
Page 5 |
Our morning prayer is, “Teach me to do thy will.” If God has a plan for our life he will not hide it from us so that we cannot learn what it is. Nor would he have a will for us, for the doing of which he holds us responsible, if it were impossible for us to do that will. How, then, does he make his will known to us? It is the work of all life. We chafe at sorrow, but in sorrow God is leading us to accept his way. We murmur when we have to suffer, but pain is God’s school in which he teaches us the lessons we cannot learn in any other way. We begin at the foot of the class, and patiently pass upward, not easily, ofttimes painfully. A good woman who has had a long experience of trouble said that she was losing her faith in God. “If God is my Father,” she said, “why has he permitted me to suffer so at the hands of one who had sworn to love, honour, and cherish me till death?” Her question cannot be answered. We may not presume to give God’s reasons for allowing his child to endure such wrong year after year. But we may say with confidence that in all our experiences of pain and suffering, of loss and disappointment, of sickness and privation, the Master is teaching us to do his will. We should never lose faith. We should keep love and trust in our hearts, whatever may come.
The last item in the programme for a day is a prayer for help. “Quicken me, O Jehovah, for thy name’s sake.” To quicken is to give new life, to strengthen. That is just what we need if we would learn to be beautiful in our Christian life. This is also just what God has promised to do for us. He knows our weakness, and would give us strength. The tasks he sets for us, he would help us to do. He wishes us to attain loveliness of disposition until he own sweetness of spirit is ours, and he will help us to attain it. The beauty we long to have in our life he will help us to fashion. He will take even our failures and make them into realizations, for the things we try, with love for Christ, to do and cannot, he will work out for us. When we have done our best, and nothing seems to come of our effort, and we sit penitent and weary beside our work, he will come and finish it himself. What we really try to do is what he sees in our life and work. Our intentions, though we seem unable to carry them out, he will fulfill. Let us not be afraid. We have a most gentle and patient teacher. If only we sincerely try to do his will and learn the lessons he sets for us, he will bring us through at last to our graduation with honour.
“I asked for strength; for with the noontide heat
I fainted, while the reapers, singing sweet,
Went forward with the ripe sheaves I could not bear.
Then came the Master, with his blood stained feet
And lifted me with sympathetic care.
Then on his arm I leaned till all was done,
And I stood with the rest, at set of sun,
My task complete.”
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