Haven’t you noticed that most flowers seem to have faces? I don’t mean that you can trace a direct resemblance to human features in them as you can in the moon; but there is something in the flowers that looks at you—something that looks at you shyly, as the wild rose; or stares at you boldly, like the marigold; or twinkles at you gaily, like the cornflower and coreopsis; or appears slightly inclined to frivolity, like the larkspur and the ragged robin; or takes life with solid seriousness, like the Canterbury bell; or gives you the innocent look of a baby, like the primrose; or beams at you with large-hearted maternal kindness, like a big gloire de Dijon.
Most flowers, you will find, give you a look with some definite characteristic—at least, so it seems to me. Probably that is one reason why they are so comforting and companionable.
And I was wanting something comforting and companionable that day. I had overworked and generally neglected the rules of common sense, till I had got to that dismal pitch that simply asks of blank space, “What’s the good of anything?”
Then more questions began to worry me.
What had Christianity accomplished, seeing the way the Sermon on the Mount was being trampled under foot by the instigators of this war? After all, wasn’t might going to win, in spite of all one believed of the supremacy of right? Wasn’t the devil having things all his own way now? What were Christians doing? Had religion lost its power? What were the churches doing? Was anybody doing anything worth whiles?
Those who have let themselves run down physically, and have neglected to take proper meals, and have turned night into day, and have tried systematically to cram a fortnight’s work into every week, know exactly where one finds oneself at the end of a few months.
And it is only the very exceptional people who do not find their spiritual condition about as jaded as their nerves after a course of this sort of thing. We get to feel that we are ploughing a very lone furrow, and it is only a step further to the state of mind that says it isn’t worth ploughing at all.
Personal experience has taught me that there is only one cure for me when I get to this state of nervous wreckage; and that is to get away to the solitudes; to listen among the great silences of the hills for the still small Voice that has never failed those who wait for its Message.
God’s methods of restoring weary humanity are many and various. Sometimes He sees that first and foremost, like Elijah, His tired children need rest and food. And just as one of the greatest terrors that can befall the worn-out worker in a city is insomnia, so one of the greatest boons that Nature in her quietudes bestows is the ability to drop off into peaceful, brain-mending oblivion.
So He giveth His beloved sleep.