| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 1 |
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It is in the every-day of life that nearly all the world’s best work is done. The tall mountain peaks lift their glittering crests into the clouds, and win attention and admiration; but it is in the great valleys and broad plains that the harvests grow and the fruits ripen, on which the millions of earth feed their hunger. So it is not from the few conspicuous deeds of life that the blessings chiefly come, which make the world, better, sweeter, happier; but from the countless lowly ministries of the every-days, the little faithfulness’ that fill long years.
“‘What shall I do to be forever know?’
‘Thy duty ever.’
‘This did full many who yet sleep unknown.’
‘Oh, never, never!
Thinkest thou perchance that they remain unknown
Whom thou know’st not?
By angel trumps in heaven their praise is blown,
Divine their lot.’”
A late writer tells a tender and beautiful story of a lowly faithfulness. It was on one of the Orkney Islands where a great rock – Lonely Rock – dangerous to vessels, juts out into the sea. In a fisherman’s hut on this island coast, one night long ago sat a young girl, busy at her spinning wheel, looking out upon the dark and driving clouds. All night she toiled and watched, and when morning came, one fishing-boat, her father’s was missing. Half a mile from the cottage her father’s body was found washed upon the shore. His boat had been wrecked on Lonely Rock.
The girl watched her father’s body after the manner of her people, till it was laid in the grave. Then when night came she arose and set the candle in her casement, which the fishermen out on the waves might see. All night long she sat in the little room spinning, trimming the candle when its light grew dim. After that, in the wild storms of winter, in the quiet calm of summer, through driving mists, illusive moonlight, and solemn darkness, that coast was never one night without the light of that one little candle. As many hanks of yarn as she had spun before for her daily bread she spun still, and one more, to pay for her nightly candle. The men on the sea, however far out they had gone, were surely always of seeing that quiet light shining to give them safe guidance. Who can tell how many hearts were cheered and lives saved from peril and death by that tiny flame which love and devotion and self-sacrifice kept there through the years?
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