| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 10 |
Page 4 |
We should forget our sorrows. It is not easy. The empty chairs remind us always of those who used to sit on them. The loneliness stays, and it takes wise and diligent watchfulness not to allow a sadness to wrap itself about us like sackcloth, or to enter into us like an atmosphere and darken our life. But God does not want our sorrows to hurt us, so as to mar our joy and beauty. He wants them to become a blessing to us, to soften our hearts and enrich our character. He wants us always to remember the friends who have been so much to us and have gone from us, but to forget the griefs in the joy of divine comfort. A lost sorrow is one of earth’s sorest losses. Every grief should leave a blessing.
There are suggestions of St. Paul’s secret of noble life – forgetting things that are behind. We should never leave behind or throw away, however, anything that is good and lovely. We are to keep all our treasures of experience. All the good impressions, influences, lessons, and inspirations that we receive, we are to cherish. We should hold fast to every good thing that comes to us. Not a good thing that is ever ours should we lose. A writer says, “I desire no future that shall break the tie of the past.” What a serious loss it would be if there were no remembering, if we could not keep ever as our own the joys, the delights, the precious things of the past! We do not begin to know what treasures we may lay up for ourselves if we live always beautifully and have only sweet and sacred memories.
“Make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts,” says Ruskin. “None of us yet know, for none of us have been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thoughts, proof against all adversity – bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure houses of precious and restful thoughts, which care cannot disturb, nor pain make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us – houses built without hands, for our souls to live in.”
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