| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 18 |
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Think of the broken things in our lives – the broken threads of our dreams; the broken hopes that once were brilliant as they shone before us, but now lie shattered about our feet; the broken plans we once made and expected to see fulfilled, but which have not been realized. Most older people can recall lost dreams, hopes, and plans, cherished in the earlier years of their lives, but which seem to have come to nothing. Some of the men with whitening hairs supposed once they were going to be millionaires. But somehow the dream did not come true. Many of us think of our career as strewn with broken things like these, and say that we have made a failure of our lives. Perhaps so, and perhaps not. It all depends upon what they have made of their life instead of what they once thought they would make of it; of what the broken things are that lie about them, and what the shining splendour really was which they have not attained. Carlyle describes success as “growing up to our full spiritual stature under God’s sky.” If that is what we have been doing instead of becoming millionaires, as we once dreamed we would, we have nothing to vex ourselves over.
There is suppose to be a good deal of tragedy in the broken things of life, but there is a great deal more and sadder tragedy in very much of what the world calls success. Some one wrote under the name of one who had achieved phenomenal success in business this description, “Born a man and died a grocer.” He became a great grocer, but the man was lost in the process. He was only a grocer now. It might have been better if his dream had been broken – it certainly would have been better if the grocer had been a failure and through the failure the man had reached up to splendid spiritual stature under God’s sky.
Some people have lying about them broken dreams of social success. Some tell of disappointments in other ways, in scholarship, in art, in music, in friendship, in love, in happiness, in intellectual development, in popularity. Whatever these shattered dreams may be, Christ bids us gather up the broken pieces. They are of priceless value or the Son of God would not set his eye upon them and so earnestly call us to gather them all up. There is ofttimes far more value in the broken things of life, things men weep over, things they regard as only the wreckage of failure, than there is in the things they pride themselves upon as the shining token of their greatness. God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts and his ways than our ways. When he touched your brilliant dream and it seemed to fall to nothing, he built something better for you instead. When your plan was shattered, he substituted his own far nobler plan in its place.
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