| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 18 |
Page 4 |
But bread is not the only thing that men waste. Time is valuable – do we never waste time? Every hour is a pearl. Suppose you saw a man standing by the sea, with a string of pearls in his hand, and every now and then taking off one of them and flinging it into the waves. You would say he was insane. Yet how many hours of time, God’s priceless hours, of your last week did you throw away into the sea? Life itself is wasted by many people. Judas said Mary had wasted her ointment in pouring it on the Master. A little later, however, Jesus spoke of Judas as the “son of perdition,” son of waste. Judas wasted his life. He was made to be an apostle, and he died a traitor.
Jesus was most solicitous for broken lives, always trying to save them. Nobody else ever had seen any preciousness in the world’s broken lives before. Nobody had cared for the poor, the blind, the lame, and the palsied, until he came. The lunatic was bound with chains and turned out to wander wild where he would. The fallen were despised. Jesus was the first to care for these broken bits of humanity. He saw the gold of heaven gleaming in the debris of sin. He saw the possibilities of restored beauty and blessedness in the outcasts of society. “Gather up the broken pieces,” was his word to the disciples, “that nothing be lost.” That is his word to the church today. There is not a wreck of humanity anywhere, along life’s rocks and shoals that it is not the will of Christ that we should try to gather up and save.
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