| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 25 |
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Many of us fail to appreciate the value of single days. A day is too short a space, we say, that it cannot make much difference if one, just one, is dropped, or idled away in pleasure. Yet the days are links in a chain, and if one link is broken the chain is broken. In God’s plan for our life each little day has its own burden of duty, its own record to make. Then we never know the sacredness of any particular day, what it may have amid its treasures for us. Its sunshine may be no brighter than that of other days, there may be no peculiar feature in it to mark it among a thousand common days, and yet it may be to us a day of destiny. If we fail to receive it as God’s gift we may miss and lose that without which we shall be poorer all our life and in eternity.
How often do we see afterward that the days which are gone were bearers to us of heavenly gifts which we had not the wit to recognize nor the grace to take? When they have passed beyond recall, then we see what we missed in disregarding them. How these lost days shame us as they turn their reproachful eyes upon us out of the irrevocable past!
“Their advent is as silent as their going;
They have no voice, nor utter any speech,
No whispered murmur passes each to each,
As on the bosom of the years’ stream flowing,
They pass beyond recall, beyond our knowing,
Farther than sight can pierce or thought can reach;
Nor shall we ever hear them on Time’s beach,
No matter how the winds of life are blowing.
“They bide their time, they wait the awful warning
Of that dread day, when, hearts and graves unsealing,
The trumpet’s note shall call the sea and sod
To yield their secrets to the sun’s revealing;
What voices then shall thrill the judgment morning,
As our lost days shall cry aloud to God!”
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