| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 9 |
Page 5 |
Peace curbs the tongue, that it shall speak no hasty, ill-advised, impatient words. It gives quiet dignity to all the movements. Anxiety spoils many a disposition and writes lines of unrest and care upon many a face, which ought to keep lovely into old age.
Then anxiety is sin. It is not a mere unhappy thing that wastes the strength, mars the work, and hurts the temper; it is also distrust of God. We say we believe in the love of God, and then we worry over what he sends – the circumstances he appoints for us, the tasks he sets for us, the place he assigns us, the path in which he leads us, the way he deals with us. Worry is sin.
Hence we are to set it down as a positive rule that we are never to be anxious. There are no exceptions. We are not to say that our case is peculiar; than even Job would be impatient if he had our trials; that even Moses would lose his temper if he had our provocations; or even St. Paul would worry if he had our cares. This law of life has no exceptions. “In nothing be anxious.” What then shall we do with the things, which would naturally worry us? St. Paul tells us “In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.”
That is, instead of being fretted and distracted over the things, which we cannot control, we are to put them out of our own hands into God’s by specific prayer, and leave them there. No human wisdom can explain the mysteries of life. No human hand can take the strange complication of life’s events and so adjust them that they will make beauty and happiness. But there is One to whose wisdom all life’s mysteries are open and clear. There is no confusion in this world as God’s eye looks upon events. What is keen trial to us today he sees resulting in blessing and good a little while hence. The thousand apparently tangled circumstances and events, amid which our life is moving, are to him, threads with which perfect lovingness is being woven.
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