| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 1 |
Page 7 |
Perhaps you have been thinking rather discouragingly about yourself. You feel that you have hardly a fair share of comfort, of opportunities, of privileges. You have been almost fretting because you are not getting on or getting up as fast as you want to. You have been discontented, depressed. Ask God to open your eyes, and you will see your thorn bush burning with fire. Your common life is full of splendour. There is not a single hour in your commonest day that is uneventful.
You are thinking that there are no miracles any more. But there really are as many miracles any week as there were in the life of any Bible saint. Or, you have been thinking of your troubles, that you have more than your share of them. Tourists come back from their travels and tell us about the lace weavers. Their work seems to the observer a great tangle, a strange puzzle. But out of it all there comes marvelous beauty. Life seems a tangle, a puzzle, to us as we look at its events, its circumstance, its sorrows, and joys. But in the end we shall see that not one thread was ever thrown into the wrong place in the web. God is in all our life.
“I think if thou couldst see,
With thy dim mortal sight,
How meanings dark to thee
Are shadows hiding light,
Truth’s efforts crossed and vexed,
Life’s purposes all perplexed,–
If thou couldst see them right,
I think that they would seem all clear
And wise and right.”
Page 7