“I know a man in Christ” (II. Cor. xii. 2).
It is a great deliverance to lose one’s self. There is no heavier
millstone that one can be compelled to carry than self-consciousness. It
is so easy to get introverted and coiled round one’s self in our spiritual
consciousness. There is nothing that is so easy to fasten on as our
misery; there is nothing that is more apt to produce self-consciousness
than suffering, until it becomes almost a settled habit to hold on to our
burden, and pray it unceasingly into the very face of God, until our very
prayer saturates us with our own misery, instead of asking for power to
drop ourselves altogether, and leave ourselves in His loving hands and
know that we are free, and then rise into the blessed liberty of His
higher thoughts and will, and His love and care for others.
The very act of letting go of ourselves really lifts us into a higher
plane, and relieves us from the thing that is hurting. This habit of
prayer for others, and especially for the world, brings its own
recompense, and leaves upon our hearts a blessing like the fertility which
the Nile deposits upon the soil of Egypt, as it flows through to its
distant goal.