| Dr. J.R. Miller | Page 15 |
“Nothing done out of our daily path of love and duty, no fretting or chafing, will turn over the next page in the story for us, because a larger, stronger hand than ours holds the leaves together; and simply in clinging to that hand must we walk straight on and never mind our longings to see the end, how ever intense they may be. Some day we shall read the story from first to last, and see clearly the divine meaning of the whole; see it with smiling, not streaming eyes; with folded, not struggling hands.”
At the close of His wonderful words about worry, the great Teacher gives one of the secrets of unanxious living. He says we should keep the fences up between the days. “Be not therefore anxious for the morrow, for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
We should keep each day with its needs shut off by itself. To-morrow’s cares we must not bring back into to-day’s little hours. There is no room for them there, nor have we strength for them. We have just room and strength enough for to-day’s own duties and cares. No one ever finds one day’s load too heavy; it is when we try to carry the burden of other days in addition to to-day’s that we break down. It is a golden lesson, a blessed secret, this living by the day. Its beauty and its mercifulness are shown so simply, so plainly, in George Klingle’s lines, that they must be given here:
“One single day
Is not so much to look upon.
There is some way
Of passing hours of such a limit.
We can face
A single day; but place
Too many days before sad eyes
Too many days for smothered sighs
And we lose heart
Just at the start.
Years really are not long, nor 1ives
The longest which survives
And yet to look across
A future we must tread bowed by a sense of loss,
Bearing some burden weighing down so low,
That we can scarcely go
One step ahead—this is so hard,
So stern a view to face; unstarred,
Untouched by light, so masked with dread.
If we would take a step ahead,
Be brave, and keep
The feet quite steady; feel the breath of life sweep
Ever on our face again.
We must not look across—looking in vain
But downward to the next close step,
And up. Eyes that have wept
Must look a little way, not far.
God broke the years to hours and days,
That hour by hour
And day by day,
Just going on a little way,
We might be able all along
To keep quite strong.
Should all the weights of life
Be laid across our shoulders, and the future, rife
With woe and struggle, meet us face to face
At just one place,
We could not go;
Our feet would stop. And so
God lays a little on us every day,
And never, I believe, on all the way,
Will burdens bear so deep,
Or pathways lie so steep,
But we can go, if by God’s power
We only bear the burden of the hour.”
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