The great Teacher does not say that we are not to be thoughtful, or
provident; but He insists that no event can be provided for by anxiety,
by fretting over it before it comes. Half the people on our streets
look as though life was a sorry business. It is hard to find a happy
looking man or woman. Worry is the cause of their woebegone
appearance. Worry makes the wrinkles; worry cuts the deep,
down-glancing lines on the face; worry is the worst disease of our
modern times.
Care is contagious; it is hard work being cheerful at a funeral, and it
is a good deal harder to keep the frown from your face when you are in
the throng of the worry worn ones. Yet, we have no right to be
dispensers of gloom; no matter how heavy our loads may seem to be we
have no right to throw their burden on others nor even to cast the
shadow of them on other hearts.
Anxiety is instability. Fret steals away force. He who dreads
to-morrow trembles to-day. Worry is weakness. The successful men may
be always wide-awake, but they never worry. Fret and fear are like
fine sand, thrown into life's delicate mechanism; they cause more than
half the friction; they steal half the power.
Cheer is strength. Nothing is so well done as that which is done
heartily, and nothing is so heartily done as that which is done
happily. Be happy, is an injunction not impossible of fulfillment.
Pleasure may be an accident; but happiness comes in definite ways. It
is the casting out of our foolish fears that we may have room for a few
of our common joys. It is the telling our worries to wait until we get
through appreciating our blessings. Take a deep breath, raise your
chest, lift your eyes from the ground, look up and think how many
things you have for which to be grateful, and you will find a smile
growing where one may long have been unknown.
Take the right kind of thought--for to take no thought would be
sin--but take the calm, unanxious thought of your business, your
duties, your difficulties, your disappointments and all the things that
once have caused you fear, and you will find yourself laughing at most
of them. In some you will see but friends in disguise, and in others
puny foes decked out as giants. But begin to dread them, brood over
them, look at them with eyes prejudiced with fear, and the least
difficulties rise like mountains. In winter some people worry
themselves into malaria over the mosquitoes they may meet next summer.
Mistaken ideas of religion are responsible for a great many of the
unnecessary wrinkles on the human face. Too many have thought it would
be impossible to be happy in two worlds, and so, having elected
happiness in the one which they thought would last longest, they have
no choice but to be unhappy in this one. In fact, some seem to suppose
that the greater their misery here the more intense will their bliss be
there. If heaven is to be bought that way certainly many are paying
full price for it.
Burdens we all must bear; but they need not break us. Sorrows we all
must share; but they need not unmake us. They will not if we have
learned the Teacher's secret of living; He, the man of sorrows, was the
man who could bequeath to His friends His joy. To Him life lost its
anxiety, because the chief things of life were not food or raiment, or
even social standing, but manhood and unselfishness to men, and the
possibilities of these were as easily realized in need and adversity as
in riches and prosperity.
V