Yet, true as all this is, how inadequate it is! When the tides of care
are at the flood they will overrun and submerge all such counsels as
these, as the waves wash away the little sand-hills which children build
by the sea-shore. "We know it is no good to worry," people will tell us,
half-petulantly, when we remonstrate with them; "but we cannot help
ourselves, and if you have no more to say to us than this, you cannot
help us either." And they are right. Care is the cancer of the heart,
and if our words can go no deeper than they have yet gone, it can never
be cured. It is an inward spiritual derangement, which calls for
something more than little bits of good advice in order to put it right.
And if, again, we turn to the words of Jesus, we shall find the needed
something more is given. The care-worn soul, for its cure, must be taken
out of itself. "Oh the bliss of waking," says some one, "with all one's
thoughts turned outward!" It is the power to do that, to turn, and to
keep turned, one's thoughts outwards that the care-ridden need; and
Christ will show us how it may be ours.
"Be not anxious," says Jesus; and then side by side with this negative
precept He lays this positive one: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God."
Christ came to establish a kingdom in which "all men's good" should be
"each man's rule," and love the universal law. When, therefore, He bids
the anxious seek the kingdom, what He means is that they are to find an
escape from self and self-consuming cares in service. "When you find
yourself overpowered by melancholy," said John Keble, "the best way is
to go out and do something kind to somebody or other." And thousands who
are sitting daily in the gloom of a self-created misery, with all the
blinds of the spirit drawn, if they would but "go out" and begin to care
for others, would speedily cease their miserable care for themselves.
"When I dig a man out of trouble," some one quaintly writes, "the hole
he leaves behind him is the grave in which I bury my own trouble."[47]
This is not the whole cure for care; but if the mind is to be kept from
burrowing in the dark of its own fears and anxieties, it must be set
resolutely and constantly on those nobler ends to which Christ in His
gospel summons us all.
The care-worn, Christ says, must think of others; and, most of all, they
must think of God. "Let not your heart be troubled ... believe." This is
the great argument into which all other arguments run up. This is the
larger truth, within whose wide circumference lie all Christ's words
concerning care. We are not to care because we are cared for, cared for
by God. There is, Christ teaches us, a distribution of duties between
ourselves and God. We, on our part, make it our daily business to get
God's will done on earth as it is done in heaven; He, on His, undertakes
that we shall not want.
"Make you His service your delight,
He'll make your wants His care."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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