Article May 7, 1932 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from James Reid, Storr, A Correspondent

[Rev. James Reid, M. A., in the British Weekly, London, England]

The real difference between two people is not in what happens to them, whether they are rich or poor, whether they are fortunate or unfortunate, whether they have sorrow to meet, or life flows on like a sunlit stream that never ruffles the surface of their days. It is in the way in which they react to these things. Put one man in prison unjustly, and he eats out his heart in resentful solitude till his soul becomes bitter and dark. But put Paul, or John Bunyan, there, and the solitude becomes a spur, ... and an immortal book is born. Sorrow makes one man hard; it makes another equally soft and tender. One who has suffered will tell you how unjust the world is. Another will tell you how in his suffering he came to know the comforts of God as he had never known them when life was undimmed by a tear. ...

What did Paul say? His first reflection was, "If God be for us, who can be against us?" His first thought was to assure himself again that nothing, literally nothing, not even death, could be against him. Nothing need hurt, or demean, or degrade his spirit. On the contrary, because God was for him everything in this clash between him and circumstances had possibilities of good. That faith robs everything of its power if we once get it. ... If we meet life in this confidence we shall find in it a transforming secret. The very blows of fate can become the strokes of the master's chisel upon the marble, releasing the hidden beauty. Even the unwelcome duty can take on the angel face of a divine opportunity. We shall learn by experience to expect it. And this faith will begin to produce in us new capacities for meeting life—courage, and kindness, and patience. Difficulty will work on us like a tough problem on the mind of the engineer, who knows that difficulty has always been the doorway of discovery. And if we feel that we have not the capacity for facing some things, that they are beyond our feeble strength, let us further reflect with Paul, "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?"

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