Week 41 Sunday
Week 41 Sunday
Working with a Wound in your Side
Matthew 14:12-21; 16:21; 1 Peter 2:21-24
So important is this power to turn the worst into the best, that we must tarry another week with it. For if we learn this secret, we know how to live. If we don’t learn it, then we fumble this business of living. It is simply impossible, in reference to suffering, always to explain why. You cannot unravel the mystery of suffering and give a logical answer. But, while you cannot explain the Why, you can learn the How—the How of victory over it and through it and around it. There is no logical answer, but there is a life answer; you can use suffering. It is much better to give a vital answer than a verbal one. Cease worrying over the Why and get to the How!
Look at this picture: Jesus had just heard that John the Baptist, his cousin and forerunner and beloved friend, had been beheaded, and the account continues: “When Jesus heard it, he withdrew by boat to a desert place in private”—he wanted to be alone to let the wound in his heart heal a bit— “but the crowds heard of it and followed him on foot from the towns”—they broke up his plans. “So when he disembarked, he saw a large crowd, and out of pity for them he healed their sick folk” (Matt. 14:13-15 Moffatt).
And then he fed the multitude. He worked for others with a wound in his own breast. Many of us have to go through life working with a wound. But that wound, instead of making Jesus bitter against the injustice of John’s beheading, made him more tender with others: “out of pity for them he healed their sick” and fed their hungry. If you have to work with a wound in your side, remember, that wound will be healing to others; your very hunger for consolation can feed others.
Just before he was to speak in the chapel in India, a missionary friend received a cable that his father had died. He said nothing to us before the service, but went on and preached a tenderly beautiful message, the transcript of his own beautiful soul. Only after the service did he tell us he had received the cable. He worked with a wound, and that wound was healing to others.
Master of the inward wound, teach us your mastery. May I not wince, or turn back, or glance back, even in thought, when wounded by life. Help me go steadily on, knowing that your wounds are answering my wounds. It may be that my wounds shall answer someone else’s wounds. For this is a hurt world. Make my hurts healing. In your name. Amen.
Week 41 Monday
The Berry in the Mouth
Isaiah 37:3-7; 41:10, 13; 42:16
In Africa, there is a berry that, when held in the mouth, sweetens the taste of everything else one eats. The Christian has something like that—the power to transform every calamity into opportunity. That power to use everything is the berry that sweetens the bitterest calamity.
Someone has spoken of “getting music out of life’s remainders.” Sometimes life leaves nothing on our hands but remainders. But you can gather up those remainders and make music out of them. Such a person I saw yesterday, a person whose face was chiseled into strength and beauty. She was stricken with infantile paralysis at age twenty-eight; her husband died when she was forty-five. She decided she would walk, even after the doctors told her the muscles were gone. She created new muscles out of her own will and the grace of God. At forty-seven, she took a course in stenography, typing, and secretarial work and is now doing what everybody else is doing—and more; she is doing it in a radiant, triumphant way. She is making music out of life’s remainders.
“Christians, when they get to the end of a rope, tie a knot and hang on.” For they knows that very extremity is God’s opportunity. Someone has suggested that the “silence in heaven for about half an hour,” spoken of in Revelation 8:1, was God shifting the scenes for the next act. The silent, suffering spaces in your life may be God getting you ready for the next great act. Hold steady; the next act will come. In the meantime, take hold of your dull drab moments and make them give forth music. Speaking of a certain person, someone suggested: “Give him a laundry list, and he will set it to music.”
The latent possibilities are all there in life, bring out of it what you will. The Russian proverb says, “A hammer shatters glass but forges steel.” The calamities that shatter some will forge you into character and achievement.
O God, my Lord, I see I need not whine or complain. I can make music out of misery, a song out of sorrow, and achievement out of accident. I cannot be beaten. For everything is grist for my mill. I will turn everything, good, bad, and indifferent, into something else. I thank you. Amen.
Week 41 Tuesday
Blind and Deaf, yet Adequate
Joel 2:25-32; Galatians 4:13-15
We spoke yesterday of a berry in the mouth that sweetens everything. That berry is a spirit of courage and faith. A brilliant young man, my first Sunday school scholar, was surveying a swamp near a powder factory. He struck a piece of board on which there was a blister of nitroglycerin, and it exploded, rendering him totally blind and deaf. At twenty-six, he was doomed to a dungeon existence without light, without sound.
“For twenty-four hours,” he said, “I was beaten. ‘None of my family ever dies before eighty, and I’m twenty-six,’ I said to myself, inwardly beaten.” But at the end of twenty-four hours, he “snapped out of it,” as he puts it, and determined to meet life as a Christian; he would find grace in the dungeon. He has. He brought a family into the world and supported them through a business he set up. There is no way of communicating with him except by printing out the letters of words on the back of his hand; so all the correspondence in his business goes, not through his hands, but on the back of his hand. When I asked him how it felt to be cut off from the world, he laughed and said, “I’m not cut off from the world.” He isn’t; every portion of his being is vibrant with receptivity. He is informed on everything.
To my question as to what was his greatest disability, he replied, “I have a bad temper and get angry with those I love.” A blind and deaf man says his greatest disability is a moral disability! When I asked him if there was anything he did not want me to say about him, he replied, “Don’t put it on too thick, for people will either think you are exaggerating or that I’m a superman. Put it just where everybody can get it: Nobody need be beaten, no matter what happens.”
This man illustrates the fact that the thing that matters is not what happens to you, but what you do with it after it does happen. Christians are afraid of nothing, for they can use everything.
Jesus said: “Nothing outside a man can defile him. . . . It is what comes from him that defiles him” (Mark 7:15 Moffatt). Your reaction to what happens to you determines the result.
Brave Christ, make me brave. Even if the worst should happen to me, we can turn it into the best. I say “we,” for I cannot do it alone. With you I can do anything, bear anything, go through anything. Without you I wither. But I am with you, so I face the future with calm joy. Everything is under my feet. Amen.
Week 41 Wednesday
Making All Things Work Together for Good
Romans 8:28-39; Philippians 1:12-14
We ended yesterday on the note that nothing need beat us, provided we have the right attitude of mind. When the storm strikes the eagle, if its wings are set in a downward tilt, it will be dashed to pieces on the earth; but if its wings are tilted upward, it will rise, making the storm bear it up beyond its fury. The set of the wings decides defeat or victory.
Christianity gives a set of the soul, so that when trouble and frustration and disaster strike one, the Christian goes up, with soul wings set in that direction. The same disaster strikes another, and, with soul attitudes tilted earthward, the person writhes in anguish in the dust. Death strikes a home, and in it leaves bitterness and frustration; in another, calm and quiet victory and greater usefulness.
Some students discussing Romans 8:28 said to a professor in Union Theological College, Richmond, Virginia*, “But, professor, you don’t believe that all things work together for good—all the pain and suffering and misery—do you?” The professor replied, “The things in themselves may not be good, but you can make them work together for good.” That afternoon his wife was killed in an automobile accident, and he was left disabled. He sent for the president of the institution and said, “Tell my students that Romans 8:28 still holds good.” He died in a year. They inscribed this passage from Romans on his tomb, for it was inscribed in his convictions.
One of the greatest preachers of the South stood again and again beside that tomb with bared head and prayed that he might have that kind of grace. The professor has gone further in his influence through his triumphant spirit—seen as in a flash—in that tragedy, than he would have through long years of teaching. One can live by the hourglass, or by the heartbeat, and sometimes those who live only in the heartbeat live more fully and more influentially.
O Christ, only through three short years did you labor. But the eternities were packed into the hours of those years. Whether I live short or long, let my hours have eternity packed into them. Will you not be in every one of those hours? And then nothing can make me afraid. For I have the secret. I can make all things work together for good. I thank you. Amen.
* Now Union Presbyterian Seminary.
Week 41 Thursday
Victorious Vitality Mastering Circumstances
Luke 23:27-28; John 16:32-33; 2 Corinthians 2:14
Victorious vitality is a vitality capable of mastering everything because it can use everything. It can lay hold on the raw materials of human living—justice and injustice, pleasure and pain, compliment and criticism—and take them up into the purposes of our lives and transmute them into character and usefulness.
Just across the hall from where I was staying, a poor fellow, beaten by life, went into a clothes closet and hung himself on a clothes bar that was only five feet from the floor; he had to hold up his feet until life was extinct. In deep contrast to this man is a woman in another town whom I went that day to see. She has been forty-four years upon her bed, but is unbeaten by life. On the contrary, she has mastered life. She had three diseases, any one of which would have killed a normal person; but she is the unkillable kind. She laughingly said, “These different disease germs fell to fighting each other down on the inside of me; and as they fought, they forgot about me, and I lived on.”
Lying prone upon her back, she set up a gift shop, and began to make exquisite butterfly pendants. She was soon making enough money to pay an income tax. She laughingly said, “I sent off my check to the government with my love.” When you can pay your income tax with your love—well, that’s a miracle! A magazine gave her one hundred dollars for the story of her gift shop and then gave her one thousand dollars for the best true story of the year. A publisher, seeking the autobiographies of great Americans, happened on her life story; and at his request she has now written a hundred thousand words of her autobiography. Her room is the confessional of the city; the bedpost upon which I leaned was literally worn down with people leaning on it and telling this invalid their troubles. Young and old go away new after opening their hearts to her gentle wisdom and sympathy. She is seventy-two, but incorrigibly gay, her face made beautiful by the beautiful spirit that lives behind it.
O Christ of the exuberant joy, give me this joy—in spite of. Save me from all self-pity, all feeling sorry for myself, and let me be outgoing and positive, taking on myself the problems of others. Don’t let any corroding sorrow invade me. Help me keep my sorrows in use as the servants of the sorrows of others. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 41 Friday
God’s Watch-care over Our Spirit
Ephesians 3:13-21; Philippians 2:12-13; 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24
The gift-shop lady of whom we wrote yesterday runs “The Doctors’ Exchange” of the town. Sick people call up an invalid to find out where to get a doctor! When I asked her what was the central thought of the year she replied, “God’s watch-care.” Think of an invalid’s choosing “God’s watch-care” as her central thanksgiving! If God cared, then why did God not heal her?
In the introduction, we said that God heals in eight great ways: through medicine; by surgery; scientific nutrition; climate; mental suggestion; deliverance from underlying fears, resentments, self-centeredness, and guilts; the direct operation of the Spirit of God; and through the resurrection. Whatever God does not cure through the first seven ways, God will cure through the eighth: the resurrection. To some, God entrusts the ministry of suffering until the Day of the Final Cure—the resurrection, in the meantime giving them power, not merely to bear the suffering, but to use it. The “watch-care” of which God’s noblewoman spoke was “watch-care” over her spirit, that her spirit should remain unspoiled and sound. Healed at the heart, she could say, “Let the world come on!” Sound at heart, she was ready for anything. God’s watch-care may be particularly exercised in producing inner attitudes, for in our inner attitudes the battle of life is lost or won.
A lady arose in one of our meetings and said that the doctors had given her six months to live—cancer of the lungs. She said:
At first, I was bitter and rebellious. How could I leave my children and my husband? Then I said to myself, “If I have only six months to live, am I going to leave my children a heritage of defeat and frustration? Is that the last thing they will remember about me? Or will they have a heritage of calm poise and victory?” I decided I would leave them a Christian heritage of victory. Ever since I surrendered my rebellion and bitterness, there has been calm poise, and even joy. The fact is, I’ve gained ten pounds.
God’s watch-care was over her spirit, which was intact. Nothing else really mattered!
O God, watch over my spirit and keep me sound there. For if I sag in spirit, all life sags with it. If my spirit holds up, everything holds up with it. Then help me live within with abundance, so that it will not matter much what happens on the outside. Into your hands I commend my spirit this day—keep it sound and sweet and gay, in spite of! Amen.
Week 41 Saturday
Making Life Count with Small Equipment
Exodus 4:10-16; Jeremiah 1:4-8; Luke 9:12-17
We cannot close this week’s study of how to meet calamity and frustration in any better way than by recounting the story of a missionary family. The surviving son in the family, who had to cut short a theological course because of a very serious, major operation, saw me off at an airport, and said, “I’m proud of my family.” “Proud of my family”—and well he might be!
The parents went to China, and there the father contracted an infection that left him blind. The mother died of cancer after a painful, lingering illness. One son died in college of Addison’s disease; another son died in college from an infection following an abrasion of the skin received while in athletic activities. The daughter was stricken with infantile paralysis, and now hobbles on crutches. This is the wreckage of a family that went forth from their homeland to serve China! Is there any watch-care of God here? Does God care at all? Why was the son proud of his family? Well he might be, for though the father and daughter left at home have only a Seeing Eye dog and a pair of crutches between them as their physical equipment with which to meet life, yet they are meeting it gloriously. The father is pastor of a church, and the daughter keeps house for him, on crutches. More, she organizes the games of the church, drives a specially equipped car, and is her father’s right hand. Together they go on unbeaten; and not only unbeaten, but amazingly useful. The father keeps a church going and lectures all over the country. And, better than all, he keeps a radiant soul! Yes, the young man is right. He should be proud of his family; and we are proud of the young man who can look beyond the wreckage of his family and see there the essential victory of spirit. This is the victory that overcomes the world of sorrow and frustration, even our faith. If the faith is intact, nothing else really matters; you can rise unscathed from anything.
Christians are safe because they can use anything that happens to them.
O Jesus, hanging on the cross you said, “My God,” even when the light had gone out, and everything had collapsed. With those words on your lips, you rose gloriously from gloom to glory. Let no sorrow, no disappointment, pluck those words, “My God,” from my lips and from my heart; and I, too, shall prevail over everything. I thank you. Amen.