| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 17 |
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Now, the question is, Are these unavailing efforts real failures? Have we sinned in not succeeding? Ought we not to have been victorious? Is there shame in our being driven back or held at bay? The answer is that if we have done our best to win, and still come short, we may accept our failure as God’s will for us. Then we shall find that the blessing which we thought to get in overcoming becomes ours in defeat. That is, God’s withholding from us what we sought was a better good than the granting of the desired thing would have been. Perhaps it was some earthly favor or treasure we craved. If we had succeeded in getting it, it might not have proved a real blessing after all. Perhaps we were meant to get the blessing in the striving and then in the discipline of submission when after all the prize was not grasped.
If we believe in Providence – that there is a Hand moving amid all life’s affairs, so directing and adjusting them that for each one who loves God good is continually wrought out – we find comfort in the thought that when we fail it is our Father who suffers us not to succeed; that it is he who sets up and bars the gate in the path we sought so eagerly to enter. We may certainly believe this of hindrances which are invincible – inevitableness is clearly God’s will for us. We may believe, also, that the true blessing is, then, in the not having, rather than, as we supposed, in the having.
Some flowers have poison mingled in their cup of fragrance; to pluck the flower would be to breathe death. The place we tried so hard to win, and which we imagined would have been ideal in its honor and opportunity, would have proved a nest of thorns, with complications and perplexities which would have made our life miserable. The money we hoped to have made would have brought more luxury and ease to us, but we would have lost something of our spiritual earnestness if we had got it. With too many people the growth of worldly possessions is balanced by a corresponding loss of heavenly longings.
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