Country life -- Fiction; Vicars, Parochial -- England -- Fiction
“It has been well said that no man ever sank under the burden of the
day. It is when to-morrow’s burden is added to the burden of to-day,
that the weight is more than a man can bear. Never load yourselves so,
my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this:
it is your own doing, not God’s. He begs you to leave the future to
Him, and mind the present. What more or what else could He do to take
the burden off you? Nothing else would do it. Money in the bank
wouldn’t do it. He cannot do to-morrow’s business for you beforehand to
save you from fear about it. That would derange everything. What else
is there but to tell you to trust in Him, irrespective of the fact that
nothing else but such trust can put our heart at peace, from the very
nature of our relation to Him as well as the fact that we need these
things. We think that we come nearer to God than the lower animals do
by our foresight. But there is another side to it. We are like to Him
with whom there is no past or future, with whom a day is as a thousand
years, and a thousand years as one day, when we live with large bright
spiritual eyes, doing our work in the great present, leaving both past
and future to Him to whom they are ever present, and fearing nothing,
because He is in our future, as much as He is in our past, as much as,
and far more than, we can feel Him to be in our present. Partakers thus
of the divine nature, resting in that perfect All-in-all in whom our
nature is eternal too, we walk without fear, full of hope and courage
and strength to do His will, waiting for the endless good which He is
always giving as fast as He can get us able to take it in. Would not
this be to be more of gods than Satan promised to Eve? To live
carelessly-divine, duty-doing, fearless, loving, self-forgetting
lives—is not that more than to know both good and evil—lives in which
the good, like Aaron’s rod, has swallowed up the evil, and turned it
into good? For pain and hunger are evils, but if faith in God swallows
them up, do they not so turn into good? I say they do. And I am glad to
believe that I am not alone in my parish in this conviction. I have
never been too hungry, but I have had trouble which I would gladly have
exchanged for hunger and cold and weariness. Some of you have known
hunger and cold and weariness. Do you not join with me to say: It is
well, and better than well—whatever helps us to know the love of Him
who is our God?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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