| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 17 |
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We should miss many of life’s best things, therefore, if we regarded all the obstacles in our path as providential limits set to our progress. Instead of being limits they are intended to be passed. They hide within themselves good gifts of God for us which we shall miss if we make no struggle to master them. Nothing really worth while can be got easily. We must pay a high price for all life’s best things. It is the treasures that cost us most that most enrich us. The finest, purest gold lies deepest and is hardest to find and dig out. We must make sure, therefore, first of all, that the obstacle which seems to block our path is not one which God really means us to master, taking from it its spoil of blessing. The old story of Jacob’s wrestling illustrates this. It was not an enemy who met the patriarch that night by the Jabbok, although he seemed to oppose him and soon grappled with him as in a struggle of life and death. The wrestler was God’s messenger and he had a blessing for Jacob, but it could be got only in a victorious struggle. All night the contest went on. At last Jacob prevailed, not by physical strength, but really through being defeated. He went lame and limping from the place of wrestling, but there was a new light in his eyes and a new power in his heart; he had got a blessing in his struggle.
This story is a parable of all life’s antagonisms. They seem to be enemies, intent on doing us harm; but really they are our friends, bearing divine gifts and blessings for us which, however, we can get only in victorious wrestlings. Ofttimes, too, we are lamed in the fierce contest, but the shrinking of our natural strength is the mark of new power in us. Limping Jacob was Israel now, a prince with God.
But not always is our wrestling victorious. There are in every earnest life obstacles which prove impassable barriers in our course. Strive as we may, we cannot surmount them. The door is shut in our face, and we cannot open it. Human strength avails not to cut its way through the lines of environment. We are defeated, and can do nothing but submit.
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