| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 4 |
Page 4 |
A recent writer, speaking of the habit of worry and of the evil that comes from it, asks, in order to test the spirit of Christian lives: “What is the effect of your presence in your home? Does your look fall like a sunbeam or like a shadow across the breakfast table? Does your conversation lie like a strip of summer sky, or a patch of midnight, across the family life? Upon what subjects do you speak with largest freedom and keenest relish – your aches and failures, or the things which are beautiful, fine, and high? For your own sake, and for the sake of others, you ought to bring your soul into a jubilant mood. All Christian virtues grow best under a sky filled with sun, and the man who persists in being gloomy, sour, and moody, will have his home filled at last with weeds, brambles, and briers.”
So we see that the lesson of peace is not a mystical and unpractical one, but one that is most practical. Our hearts make our lives. If we are not learning this lesson, if peace is not ruling more and more in our hearts, our lives are becoming less and less beautiful. We do not ourselves like people who are sour, misanthropic, and censorious, who are dictatorial, tyrannical, and who are not disposed to be kindly, obliging, and agreeable. And what is not beautiful to our eyes in others is not likely to be lovely to the eyes of others in us. Our religion must be winsome; else it is not the religion that Christ teaches us. “Whatsoever things are lovely,” is one of the features which we find in St. Paul’s wonderful picture of true Christian character.
We need to look well, therefore, to the matter of the growth of loving peace in our life. Wherever it rules in the heart it produces beauty in the disposition. It makes the whole life more and more loving. In horticulture they tell us that thorns are only leaves which through heat or lack of water or some other unfavourable conditions, have failed to grow. The thorns which we dislike so would have been beautiful leaves but for the hindering conditions under which they grew. It is, no doubt, true of the things in us which are disagreeable – and we all have them – that they are perverted or arrested growths. God meant them to be lovely qualities in us, marks of beauty, adornments to make our lives more Christ like. But in some way they have been stunted, dwarfed, perverted, and in actual life are thorns instead of shining leaves. Instead of being benedictions to other lives, these marred growths in us hurt them. Instead of being leaves to give shade to those who seek shelter from the heat, they are thorns which pierce, give pain, and wound.
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