| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 22 |
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If we knew that this present day were our very last, we should certainly strive to make it a most beautiful day. We should fill it with all loving service and gentle ministries. We should not mar it with selfishness and ugly tempers. We should awaken every energy of our being to its best power, and should work with all our might. We should not have one moment to spare for discontent, for idle dreaming, for complaint or murmuring, for pride, for regret; we should crowd the day to its last moment with love’s fidelities and duties.
Since any day may really be our last, we should live continually as if it were the last. We should make each day that God gives us beautiful enough to be the end of life. How may we do this?
We should keep all our work completed as we go on. This applies to our business and all our routine task-work. The weekday side of our life has a great deal more to do with our spiritual life, with the building of our character, with our growth in grace, than many of us think. Some people seem to imagine that there is no moral or spiritual quality whatever in life’s common task-work. On the other hand, no day can be made beautiful whose secular side is not as full and complete as its religious side. If we have read your Bible, and loving toward our neighbor all the day, and yet have been indolent or negligent in our business, letting things run behind, putting off important duties till to-morrow, not paying debts that fell due, not keeping engagements or promises, leaving affairs tangled and in confusion, at the going down of the sun, we cannot call our day’s work well done.
Therefore, to be beautiful enough for the last day of life, each day must see all its work done with painstaking carefulness and fidelity. No piece of work must be slighted or done in a slovenly way. No duty, which belonged in the day, must be postponed. Especially should all matters of business affected or involving others be attended to, so that if we never come again to our desk there shall be no confusion, no entanglement, and no hurt done to anyone. People have died suddenly, and their affairs have been left in sough shape that they never could be straightened out. Others with large plans for philanthropic bequests have deferred the writing of their will until death snatched them away, leaving all their liberal intentions to fail through their own negligence.
There should never be an hour in any person’s life when instant dying would leave any of their smatters in confusion, or in a shape which would cause litigation or controversy after they matured purposes concerning the distribution of their property shall come to naught. We should finish each day’s work and close its business affairs as carefully and conscientiously as if we knew it to be our last day.
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