| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 18 |
Page 5 |
Those who are labouring to gather up the broken pieces should never be discouraged. Christ is with them wherever they go. They are his, these broken lives. No particle of matter ever perishes. Life is immortal, and imperishable. No soul shall ever cease to be. Then no work for God is ever lost.
“There is no labour lost
Though it seem tossed
Into the deepest sea.
In dark and dreary nights,
‘Mid stormy flash of lights,
It cometh back to thee,–
Cometh not as it went,
So strangely warped and bent,
But straight as an arrow new.
And though thou dost not know
How right from wrong may grow,
From false the true–
Thou mayest confess ere long
Sorrow hath broke forth in song–
That life comes out of death,
The lily and rose’s breath
From beds where ugly stains
Were washed below by earthly rains.
Fear not to labour, then,
Nor say, ‘I threw my time away!’
It is for God, not men,
To count the cost and pay.”
The broken pieces of bread were part of our Lord’s miracle, and therefore were sacred. The broken things in our lives, if we are living faithfully, are of Christ’s breaking. They are his way of giving us what we have longed and asked for; of letting us do the thing we wanted to do. It will be well if we accept them as such. The disappointment we had was Christ’s appointment. One tells of a broken day, nothing done that in the morning was put into the schedule for the day, but countless interruptions instead – the coming of others with their needs, to be helped, until all the hours were gone. In the evening the day was deplored and grieved over as a lost one, but the answer of comfort given was that these interruptions were bits of the divine will coming into the human programme. They seemed only broken bits, but they were the best of all the day’s work. We may gather up these broken pieces in faith and love.
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