AT THE POOL OF LIFE
The unsatisfied hunger we experience during this life, creates a longing in every human heart for another trial at living after this life has been lived to the end. Once out on a desert, some travelers were perishing from thirst. The man came to a small oasis amidst a few gnarled and twisted trees. The sight of the trees was evidence that water was near, so he hurried his steps and came near to the desired spot. He found water there, but it was stagnated and foul, wild animals had been drinking and wading and wallowing in the pool until it looked sickening and disgusting to the traveler.
The hopes that filled his heart as he approached the promising oasis began to ooze out through his fingers, and a sickly sensation filled his soul. Yet this was all the available water to be had. His wife joined him a few minutes later, bringing two children. They remained over night at the pool, finding that the foul water had revived them in spite of the filth. They did not know which way to go to find the inhabited country, so they erected an improvised tent and thought to live there until some traveling caravan came that way, when they would follow it back to the green earth.
They could secure flesh to eat from the fowls that came to the trees and the young of wild animals brought there to get a drink of water. And so days passed into weeks and months and years, and the longing to be rescued became as a dead hope. None were satisfied with the befouled water, nor the narrow life, but the wife and children were afraid to again brave the desert and go in search of inhabited land. One night the husband and father became so sick and disgusted with the water that he arose and stole away by the light of the moon determined to find a better place of existence or become lost and perish out on the burning sands.
Next morning there was deep sorrow at the pool. The mother and children mourned him as one dead. They tried to follow him, but his tracks were soon lost in the shifting sands, so they returned to the pool and the friendly trees, resolved to wait until some one came to take them away.
This is a good illustration of man’s life on earth. He is never satisfied nor contented. The shallow pool of stagnated water never satisfies his longings for a deeper and broader life. And finally he goes away into the night of darkness, and the winds of mystery blow the sands of oblivion over his tracks, and no one knows whither he went. And the living sit at the pool and look out over the desert of life and wonder, and wonder, and grow more and more dissatisfied and say to themselves: “This life is so unsatisfactory and barren of real pleasure—there must be sweeter and purer water away over yonder.”