Chapter 16: A Paradoxical Principle
A PARADOXICAL PRINCIPLE
YOU and I have known, either personally or through their writings, some great single women whose lives were rich and fruitful because they understood a paradoxical spiritual principle: “If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your desire with good things, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not. And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in” (or, instead of “streets to dwell in” another translation says “paths leading home”).
Here, I think, lies the answer to the barrenness of a single life, or of a life that might otherwise be selfish or lonely. It is the answer, I have found, to depression as well. You yourself will be given light in exchange for pouring yourself out for the hungry; you yourself will get guidance, the satisfaction of your longings, and strength, when you “pour yourself out,” when you make the satisfaction of somebody else’s desire your own concern; you yourself will be a source of refreshment, a builder, a leader into healing and rest at a time when things around you seem to have crumbled.
Amy Carmichael of India never married, though there are faint hints in her biography that she had had to make the choice and that it was an extremely painful thing for her to take up a cross which meant leaving a man forever. But her life was a watered garden to the hundreds of Indian children who came under her care and to the thousands who read her books.
Katherine Morgan of Colombia, a widow ever since her four girls were small, has shown us by her exuberance and humor, by her generous warm heart and her awesome energy, the strength that comes in giving a life up utterly for the good of others. Her house is full of people who need her. She drives a pickup truck all over the city of Pasto doing things for people who can’t do for themselves. She goes to the jungle by muleback or canoe or on foot to minister to people far from other sources of help. She comes to see us when she is in the States and ministers to us though she is not conscious of ministering. Our house is blessed and we ourselves are cheered and fortified because she has been here. She’s always breathless —she talks so fast she has to pronounce half her sentences on the intake. She’s always funny, and has us in tears of laughter as she impersonates a character in a story. I have often teased her for saying, “Life is too short” when I have wanted her to do something I thought she ought to do, but what it boils down to is that life is too short to bother about herself. She’s never too busy to bother about the rest of us.
You are not to live a single life, but the life of a minister’s wife will give ample scope to prove the principle set forth in Isaiah’s words. You will be pouring yourself out for the hungry and it will be assumed that you are a spring of water whose waters fail not and there will be times when you are tired of that pouring out. Your stepfather told a lady who came to him distraught with all that was expected of her. “I work my fingers to the bone for this church and what kind of thanks do I get?” she wailed. “Well,” he said, “what kind of thanks did you expect?”
St. Ignatius of Loyola prayed, “Teach us, Good Lord, to serve Thee as Thou deservest; to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor and not to ask for any reward save that of knowing that we do Thy will. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.”