| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 17 |
Page 5 |
According to St. Paul’s teaching, love “suffereth long.” It never gets tired doing things, making sacrifices, even enduring rudeness and injustice. Love is also “kind” – is always doing little, obliging things. Love “vaunteth not itself” – does not pose or strut as if wiser and superior, is not self conceited, masterful, tyrannical. Love “seeketh not its own.” That is the secret of it all. Too many people do seek their own, and never thing of the other. It is self love that makes so many of us hard to get along with, exacting, touchy, sensitive to slights, disposed to think we are not fairly treated, and which sends us off to sulk and pout when we cannot have our own way. What difference whether we are fairly treated or not? Love does not give a thought to such questions. It does not think at all of itself.
“Love thyself last. Look near, behold thy duty
To those who walk beside thee down life’s road;
Make glad their days by little acts of beauty,
And help them bear the burden of life load.”
There is a story of two brothers who were crossing a lake one day, on the ice. They went on together until they came to a crack. The bigger boy leaped over easily, but the little fellow was afraid to try it. His brother sought to encourage him, but he could not put nerve enough into the boy to get him to make the attempt. Then he laid himself down across the crack in the ice, making a bridge of his own body, and the little fellow climbed over on him. That is what older boys should always be ready to do for their younger brothers – make bridges of their superior wisdom, strength, courage, experience, on which the little fellows may be helped over and on.
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