| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 19 |
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Some might say that the truth that we are immortal, that we shall never die, has no practical value, can make no difference on our life in this world. Why spend time in such speculations? But that is not the view St. Paul took of it. He said, “In Christ shall all be made alive… The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised… Wherefore, be ye… always abounding in the work of the Lord.” The fact that life will go on forever is the reason that we should always abound in the work of the Lord. Artists think it worth while to put their noble creations on canvas, in the hope that they may last one hundred years. But when a mother teaches her little child beautiful lessons, or puts gentle thoughts into its mind, she is doing it not for a century or for ten centuries, but for immortality. Does not this make it worth while for her to do her work well?
This truth of immortality gives a wonderful motive to those who are doing spiritual work. Some of the people whom we seek to help are broken in their earthly lives. There are those, for example, whose bodies are dwarfed and misshapen. What does the truth of the immortal life tell us about these crippled and deformed ones? Only for a little while shall they be kept in these broken bodies. What an emancipation death will be to them!
One tells of a little wrinkled old woman who sells newspapers at a certain street corner in a great city, day after day, in sun and rain, in winter and summer. Here is the story of this poor creatures’ life. She was bereft of her husband, and then an orphaned grandchild was put into her arms by her dying daughter, and she promised to provide for the little one. This is the secret that sends her to her hard task day after day. Then that is not all the story. Some old friends offered the woman a home with them in return for trifling services, but she would have had to be faithless to her trust. This she could not be. Her dead daughter’s child was sacred to her. So she stands there on the street corner in all weathers, selling newspapers to provide for the little child. Ah, it is a noble soul that is in that old bent wrinkled body! No angel in heaven is dearer to God than that poor creature, serving so faithfully at her post. Think what immortality means to her!
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