| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 13 |
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I know how much sweeter it is to work for those who are grateful, who remember our kindness, who speak their thanks and return love for every favor shown. It lightens one’s burdens. Grateful words are like cups of cold water to one who is weary and faint; and surely it is fit that men should be grateful.
But suppose they are not. Suppose years of kindness are forgotten in a moment. Suppose great sacrifices are never thought of again. Suppose deeds of love are rewarded with insult, injury, calumny, wrong, or with the stab of malice. Do these returns rob you of those higher rewards which God promises to every self denial made for his sake? Suppose one has to go through this world weary and lonely, giving out his life in unsparing measure for others, and receiving only neglect, ingratitude, even persecution. Suppose one is misunderstood, as so many good people are, his motives misrepresented, misconstrued, falsified. Suppose one is maligned, calumniated, abused. Because earth misconstrues and misunderstands, will heaven? No; there is one place where men are understood and their work and worth appreciated. No good deed will be forgotten there. No lowly sacrifice will be overlooked. There will be commendation and reward there. We may not reap here, but we shall reap nevertheless.
Then many who appeal to us for aid are utterly unworthy. Those who dispense charity have to resort to all manner of care and pains to protect themselves against imposition. A pitiful story is told – pitiful enough to melt the heart of a miser. You give money, and the treacherous recipient steals into the nearest dram shop and spends it for strong drink. Or you ask where the applicant lives, and, being reluctantly informed, you go miles away, to find that no such person ever lived there. The result of such discoveries, unless we are careful, is that the warmest hearts are closed against all appeals for help. The tendency is to chill and freeze the fountains of our charity and to stay their outflow toward the needy. We are tempted to say, “Giving money is only throwing it away; it is charity wasted as utterly as fragrance in the desert.”
It certainly is disheartening to labor for months to try to help some one, only to have him prove unworthy in the end. It seems like building a house of the costliest materials in a quagmire only to sink away out of sight. Yet they are digging up in these days buried palaces and cities in the Old World which have long been hidden out of sight. So work may seem to sink away and be lost, but God will let nothing be lost that is done for his name. It will reappear in the end. He is faithful, and will not forget your work and labor of love. You will be rewarded, even though your work has been expended on unworthy beneficiaries. Though the recipient of your charity turned out an impostor, yet, if it was bestowed in Christ’s name and for his sake, he will say at the last, “Ye did it unto me.”
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