| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 15 |
Page 4 |
There are mothers who sometimes fret because their spheres of usefulness seem so circumscribed. They long to be able to do grand things, like the few who are lifted above the common level, and to be permitted to live their lives on the mountaintop in the gaze of the world. But they, in very truth, have far grander fields than they dream. No one who lives for God and for love can be called obscure. Do not the angels watch? Does not all heaven behold? Is any one obscure who has heaven for an amphitheatre? Then who can tell the mighty, far reaching influence of the life of a lowly mother who lives for her children? Mothers have lived in hardship and obscurity, training sons to move the world, and they have lived to good purpose.
The best work of the true parent and teacher is quiet, unconscious work. It is not what a man says or does purposely and with direct intention that leaves the deepest mark in the world and in other lives, but it is the unconscious, unpurposed influences which go out from him like the perfumes from a garden, whether he wakes or sleeps, whether he is present or absent. God seems to blight the things that we are proud of and to make them come to naught. Then, when we are not intending to do anything grand, he uses us and our work for noble purposes and to make lasting impressions on the world and its life.
It is the quiet, unheralded lives that are silently building up the kingdom of heaven. Not much note is taken of them here. They are not reported in the newspapers. Their monuments will not make much show in the churchyard. Their names will not be passed down to posterity with many wreaths about them. But their work is blessed, and not one of them is forgotten.
Long, long centuries ago a little fern leaf grew in a valley. Its veins were delicate and its fibres tender. It was very beautiful, but it fell and perished. It seemed useless and lost, for surely it had made no history and left no impression in this world. But wait. The other day a thoughtful man searching Nature’s secrets came with pick and hammer and broke off a piece of rock, and there on it his eyes traced
“Fairy pencilings, a quaint design,
Leafage, veining, fibres, clear and fine,
And the fern’s life lay in every line.
So, I think, God hides some souls away,
Sweetly to surprise us at the last day.”
Not a life lived for God is useless or lost. The lowliest writes its history and leaves its impression somewhere, and God will open his books at the last, and men and angels will read the record. In this world these quiet lives are like those modest lowly flowers which make no show, but which hidden away under the tall plants and grasses, pour out sweet perfumes and fill the air with their odors. And in heaven they will receive their reward – not praise of men, but open confession by the Lord himself – in the presence of the angels and of the Father.
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