Only a Plain Common Day by J.R. Miller Perhaps the everyday of
life is not as interesting as are some of the bright special
days. It is apt to be somewhat monotonous. It is just like a
great many other days. It has nothing special to mark
it. It is illuminated by no brilliant
event. It bears no record of any brave
or noble deed done. It is not made memorable by the
coming of any new experience into the life, a new hope, a
new friendship, a new joy, and a new success. It is not even
touched with sorrow and made to stand out with the memory
of loss or struggle. It is only a plain, common day
with just the same old wearisome routine of tasks and duties and
happenings which have come so often before. Yet it is the every
day which is really the best measure and the test of noble
living Anybody can do well on special occasions. Anybody can
be good on Sundays. Anybody can be bright and cheerful
in exhilarating society. Anybody can be sweet amid gentle
influences. Anybody can make an isolated
self-denial for some conspicuous object or do a generous deed
under the impulse of some unusual emotion Anybody can do a heroic
thing once or twice in a lifetime. These are beautiful things. They
shine like lofty peaks above life's plains. But the ordinary
attainment of the common days is a truer index of the life,
a truer measure of its character and value than are the most striking
and brilliant things of its exalted moments. It requires more strength
to be faithful in the 99 commonplace duties, when no one is looking
on, when there is no special motive to stir the soul to its
best effort, than it does in the one duty, which by its unusual
importance, or by its conspicuousness, arouses enthusiasm for its own
doing. It is a great deal easier to
be brave in one stern conflict which calls for heroism, in which
large interests are involved, than to be brave in the thousand
little struggles of the common days, for which it seems scarcely
worthwhile to put on the armor. It is very much less a task to
be good-natured under one great provocation in the presence of
others, than it is to keep sweet temper month after month of ordinary
days amid the frictions, strifes, petty annoyances, and cares of
home life. Thus it is that one's everyday
life is a sure revealer of noble character than one's public acts. There are men who are magnificent
when they appear on great occasions, wise, eloquent, masterly, but
who are almost utterly unendurable in their fretfulness, unreasonableness,
irascibility, and all manner of selfish disagreeableness in
the privacy of their own homes. To those whom they ought to show
all of love's gentleness and sweetness, There are women, too,
who shine with wondrous brilliancy in society, sparkling in conversation,
winning in manner, always the center of admiring groups, resistless
in their charms, but who, in their everyday life, in the presence
of only their own households, are the dullest and most wearisome
of mortals. No doubt in these cases, the
common everyday, unflattering as it is, is a truer expression
of the inner life than the hour or two of greatness or graciousness
in the blaze of the public. On the other hand, there are
men who are never heard of on the street, whose names never
appear in the newspapers, who do no great conspicuous things,
whose lives have no glittering peaks towering high, and yet
the level plain of their years is rich in its beauty and its
fruitfulness of love. Likewise, there are women who
are the idols of no drawing rooms, who attract no throngs of admirers
around them by resistless charms, but who, in their own quiet,
sheltered world, do their daily tasks with faithfulness, move
in ways of humble duty and quiet cheerfulness, and pour out their
hearts' pure love like fragrance on all around them. who will
say that the uneventful and unpraised every day of these humble ones
is not radiant in God's sight, though they leave no memorial,
but only a world made a little better by their lives. 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 large valleys
and broad plains that the harvests grow and the fruits ripen, on
which the millions of earth feed their hunger. Likewise, 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 humble services of the everydays, the
little faithfulnesses, which fill long years. By the simple
beauty of their own humble lives, By their quiet deeds of self-sacrifice,
By the songs of their cheerful faith, And by the ministries
of their helping hands, They make one little spot on this
sad earth Brighter and happier. This Puritan devotional has been
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