| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 13 |
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The same is true of all faithful efforts to learn how to live. We may follow Christ very imperfectly, stumbling at every stop, realizing but in the smallest measure the qualities of ideal discipleship; yet if we are doing our best, and are continually striving toward whatsoever things are lovely, our efforts and attainments are beautiful in the eye of the Master and pleasing to him.
In the New Testament a distinction is made between perfection and blamelessness. We are to be presented faultless at the end before the presence of the divine glory, but even here, with all our imperfection, we are exhorted to live so as not to be blamable. That is, we are to do our best, living sincerely and unreprovably. Then as Christ looks upon us he is pleased. He notes many faults, and our best work is full of mistakes, but he sees beauty in all the imperfection because we are striving to please him and are reaching toward perfection.
There is a home of wealth and splendor in which the most sacred and precious household treasure is a piece of puckered sewing. A little child one day picked up the mother’s work – some simple thing she had been making and had laid down – and after a half hour’s quiet brought it to the mother and gave it to her, saying, “Mamma, I’s been helping ‘ou, ‘cause I love ‘ou so.” The stitches were long and the sewing was drawn and puckered. But the mother saw only beauty in it all, for it told of the child’s love and eagerness to help her and please her. That night the little one sickened, and in a few hours was dead. No wonder the mother calls that little piece of puckered sewing one of her rarest treasures. Nothing that the most skilful hands have wrought, nothing of greatest value among all her household possessions, means to her half so much as that piece of spoiled stitching by her child.
May not this be something like the way in which God looks at his children’s humblest efforts to do things for him? We are well aware how faulty even the best Christian work done in this world must seem to our Master – how full of unwisdom, of unbeauty, how foolish much of it, how mixed with self and vanity, how untactful, how indiscreet, how without prayer and love, how ignorant, how ungentle. But he does not chide us for it, does not blame us for doing so imperfectly the sacred things he gives us to do. No doubt many of our poor blunders, our most faulty pieces of work, are held among our Master’s most sacred, most cherished treasures in heaven.
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