Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of NervousnessCarroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Science
Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness
Carroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Nervous system -- Hygiene
apprehension chilled her veins, not only when associated with them,
but even more viciously when she was alone with her thoughts. And when
added to these was her superstitious fear of the Lord, magnifying the
evil of her ways, threatening, pervading, bringing no hint of Divine
love, the preparation was ample for the forthcoming emotional chaos.
At twenty-eight she was a sick woman. Through devotion to the kindly
principal of her school, a devotion not unmixed with sentiment, she
had worked intensely; quick, interested, almost capable, she had
worked and worried. School-discipline early loomed large as a rock
threatening disaster, dragging into her consciousness a sinister fear
of failure. Thirty little ones, from almost as many different homes,
representing a motley variety of home-training, looked to her to mold
them into an orderly, happy unit. Some of her little tots were as
thorns in her flesh--she couldn't keep her arms from around others;
while some afternoons the natural restlessness of them all set her
head to throbbing wretchedly. Her own emotional life not having found
order or calm, she from the first failed to develop either in her
charges. Visitors became a dread. Her only solace was the short
conferences she had with the principal after school. But to hear his
step approaching during class-time frightened her cruelly. Her order
was poor. He knew it. The visitors saw it. And the more she struggled
to master the problem of school-discipline, the greater grew the
menace of her own unorderly training. Within a few months she was
translating her emotional exhaustion into terms of overwork. The
penalty of unmerited food had produced an autotoxic anaemia, and she
was pale and weepy, easily fatigued, sleeping poorly, with the boggy
thyroid and overactive tendon reflexes so common in subacidosis. She
had to give up her school. After six months' ineffectual resting at
home, she entered a special hospital where, after some weeks of
intensive treatment, her physical restoration was remarkable. The
marriage of her sister and death of her mother closed the home, and
she went to live with a widowed aunt, the aunt who had managed her
household and her ministerial spouse to perfection. It was probably
Paul's injunction alone which kept her from taking her complacent
husband's place in the pulpit and delivering the sermons she had so
literally inspired. Here was an atmosphere of sanctity, but still no
hint of true, personal giving, no expression of willing sacrifice, and
Virginia felt keenly this lack, for in the hospital she had had a
vision. There she had seen suffering softened by gentleness, there
empty lives were filled from generous hearts, and men and women
inspired to make new and better starts. She had visioned the nobleness
of giving--and the unanswered call of her mother-nature had responded.
She was not fully well, she was not deeply living, she had never
fulfilled the best of self, and she hungered for the hospital. Her
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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