Chapter 12 Living Up to Our Best
Intentions If our best intentions continually dominated our whole
life, we would all live well. We all mean to live well. at
least there are times with all of us when we resolve to do so.
New Year's days, birthdays, communion Sundays, and other times when
the realities of life stand out in clearer relief than ordinarily
and impress us with unusual vividness, start in most of us serious thoughts
and inspire in us lofty aspirations and noble intentions. We're apt
then to make excellent resolutions and to start off in new and higher
planes of living. Now it would be well for us if
there was some way of perpetuating these better moods and living
up to these good intentions. Too often, however, the serious
impressions are but transient, and there's too little vitality
in the good intentions and resolutions to make them really potent impulses
for many days, or to give them permanence among the motives
and forces of our life. Of course we cannot make our
lives beautiful merely by alternately adopting resolutions of amendment
and wailing out dolorous confessions of failure. Life runs deeper
than mere words. Beautiful living is not fashioned
by evanescent good intentions. Blemishes and stains are not
covered up, nor are flaws mended by penitential sighings of regret. Mere transient spasms of true
living do not give grandeur to a life. If a building is to be
stable and stately, every stone from foundation to dome must
be cut and set with care. If the texture of the fabric
is to be beautiful and strong, every thread of web and woof
must be bright and clean, and the weaving must be done with
uniform skill and care. If a life is to be admirable
when finished, its periodical good intentions must become strong,
self-sustaining principles, shaping its every act, and ruling all
its days and hours. It is possible to live up to
the impulses of our best intentions, or at least to do so in much
greater degree than most of us realize. In many of these good
intentions, one element of weakness lies in their vagueness or indefiniteness. We simply resolve to be better
this year than last, or to do more good in the future than
in the past. But we have no clear and distinct
conception in our minds of the points in which we will be better,
or of the particular ways in which we will increase our usefulness. Our ideas of living better and
doing greater good are nebulous and undefined. We would be much
more apt to succeed in our new purposes if we reduce them to
definite and practical shape. In what respects will we amend
our ways? This question starts another.
What are our faults? Wherein do we fail in holy living? What are the mistakes we've been
making? The answers to these questions will indicate to us
the particular ways in which we need to live better. Then,
in what definite ways shall we strive to be more useful? To
what new Christian work shall we put our hands? Upon what new
lines of service shall we enter? Just what old mistakes are we
to avoid? If we would bring our vague hazy
ideas of greater usefulness down to some practical forms, and
then enter at once upon the execution of our resolutions, they would
be much more likely to become permanent and to grow into our
life. There are many people who sigh
over their poor Christian living and their far awayness from Christ,
and pray much and earnestly too for more faith, more love, greater
nearness to the Saviour, who, after all, have no well-defined
conceptions of the better things they would like to attain. Their
sighings are little more than a vague and indolent discontent. They think they are sincere,
but they are not, for they really do not want to be any better,
or to have more of Christ, or do more in His service. If they
did, they would soon be out of their poor unsatisfactory condition. Truly earnest longings heavenward
have a wondrous lifting power. There is a great deal of only
imagined spiritual aspiration. Very much of our singing, nearer,
my God, to you, is only the weakest kind of religious sentimentalism. Such vapid good intentions come
to nothing because there really are no good intentions to begin
with. When the spiritual daydreaming
gets vigor enough to be worthy the name of desire or purpose,
the higher attainments longed for will soon be reached. We
must really want what we ask in prayer, or we shall never
get it. Then we must help to answer our
own prayers by reaching after and struggling toward what we
want, and by climbing the steep paths that lead to radiant heights. Another element of weakness in
many of our desires for better life and larger usefulness is
that we think of great and perhaps impossible attainments, and overlook
the simple things that lie within our reach. No violent overstrained
exertions are necessary to a noble life, no superhuman efforts and
achievements, nothing but everyday duty faithfully done. The most of us must be content
to live with what are regarded as commonplace lives, without
attracting the attention of the world or winning the laurels
of fame. We must for the greater part
devote ourselves to the duties that spring out of our ordinary
business, social and domestic relations. The pressure of life's
necessities is so great that we cannot often turn aside to
do things that lie outside of our common calling. Whatever
service we render to Christ must be rendered in and along the
line of these relations, and while we are busied in the imperative
duties which every day brings to our hands. It is just at this
point that many fail. They spend all their life seeking
for the place in this world which they were intended to fill, They
never settle down to anything with any sort of restful or contented
feeling. They have a lofty, though possibly
a very nebulous, ideal of a wondrously brilliant life to which they
would like to attain, in which their powers would find full
and adequate scope, and where they could achieve great things.
But in their present condition, with its limitations, they can
accomplish nothing worthy of their powers. So they go on discontented
with their God-ordained lot and sighing for another lot. And
while they sigh, the years glide away, and soon they will come
to the end to find that they have missed every opportunity
of doing anything worthy of an immortal being in the passage
from time to eternity. The truth is, one's vocation
is never some far-off possibility. It is always for the present,
the simple round of duty that the passing hour brings. Someone
has pictured the days as coming to us with their faces veiled,
but When they passed beyond our recall, the draped figures become
radiant, and the gifts we rejected are seen to be treasures fit
for kings' houses. No day is commonplace, if only
we had eyes to see the veiled splendors that lie in its opportunities,
and in its plain and dull routine. There is no duty which comes
to our hand but brings us the possibility of kingly service
with divine reward. We greatly mistake, therefore,
if we think there's no opportunity for ordinary people to make their
years radiant and beautiful by simply filling them with acceptable
Christian service. There is room in the commonest
relations of life not only for fidelity, but for heroism, No
ministry is more pleasing to the Master than that of cheery
and hearty faithfulness to humble duty, when there's no pen to
write its history, nor any voice to proclaim its praise. To be
a good husband, loving, tender, unselfish and nourishing, or
a good wife, thoughtful, helpful, uncomplaining and inspiring,
is most acceptable service. To live well in one's place in
the world, adorning one's calling however lowly, doing one's most
common work diligently and honestly, and dwelling in love and unselfishness
with all men, is to live grandly. To fight well the battle with
one's own lusts and ill tempers, and to be victorious in the midst
of the countless temptations and provocations of everyday
experience, is to be a Christian hero. There is a field, therefore,
for victorious living very close at home. It is in these common
things that most of us must make our progress, and win our distinction,
or fail and be defeated. And there's room enough in these
mundane duties and opportunities for very noble and beautiful
lives. There's nothing nobler or greater
to a human soul than simple faithfulness. She has done what she could,
was the highest commendation that ever fell from the master's
lips. An angel could do no more. When
we are resolving to live more grandly in the future than in
the past, it will help us to bring our eyes down from the
far-off mountain peaks and from among the stars, where there's
nothing whatever for us to do, and to look close about our feet,
where lie many neglected duties, many unimproved opportunities,
and many possibilities of higher attainment in spirit, in temper,
in speech, in heart. Another element of weakness in
much of our resolving is that we try to grasp too much of life
at one time. We think of it as a whole instead
of taking the days one by one. Life is a mosaic, and each tiny
piece must be cut with skill. The only way to make a perfect
chain is to fashion each separate link with skill and care as it
passes through our hands. The only way to make a radiant
day is to make each and every hour bright with the luster of
approved fidelity. The only way to have a year at
its close, stainless and beautiful, is to keep the days, as they
pass, all pure and noble, with the loveliness of holy, useful
living. It is thus, in little days, that
our years come to us, and we have but the one small fragment
to fill and beautify at a time. The year is a book, and for each
day one fair white page is opened before us. And we are artists,
whose duty it is to put something beautiful on the page. Or we
are poets, and we are to write some lovely thought, some radiant
sentence on each leaf as it lies open before us. Or we are historians,
and must give to the pages some record of work, or duty, or victory,
to enshrine and carry away. It ought not to be hard to live
one day well. Anyone should be able to remember
God and keep his heart open toward heaven, and to remember others
in need and suffering about him, and keep his hands stretched
out in helpfulness for just one day. Yet that is all there is
to do. We never have more than one day
to live. We have no tomorrows. God never
gives us years or even weeks. He gives us only days. If we live each day well, all
our life will, in the end, be radiant and beautiful.