"My sons," said an old man on his deathbed, in giving his last counsel to his children, "I have had much trouble in this life, but most of it never happened." This is the universal experience, and it holds good with the solicitude that we feel over our temptations and other spiritual trials as in the less important matters of our temporal life.
(4) It will be a help to remind ourselves very frequently that in indulging a false anxiety concerning our spiritual difficulties, we are seeking to-day to bear the morrow's burden, something God means no soul to undertake. There are surely temptations enough to-day to require all of to-day's grace and strength; and, conversely, we know that no grace will be wanting for the trials of the present hour.
The promise is given to us as to God's people of old, "As thy days so shall thy strength be";[[15]] that is, according to the need of each particular occasion so will strength be given. There is no promise that strength will be given to-day to bear the anticipated, and often imaginary, ills of the future; and when we allow ourselves thus to anticipate them, we are courting sure defeat.
Satan delights to lead us into this false anxiety, for he knows we have at the present moment no grace to grapple with temptations and trials which do not belong to this time; and further, he knows that a faithful confidence in God now is the sine qua non to securing and storing up strength against the future trial. If he can disturb that confidence to-day, when the real temptation comes to-morrow we shall not have laid hold of the grace that was offered, and so cannot but fail, unless some extraordinary mercy of God saves us then in spite of our faithlessness.
Nor should we ever permit ourselves to forget that there may be no to-morrow. "Remember that it is God's, not thine."[[16]] How sad a case would it be (and doubtless there have been many such), if we should weaken our souls and God's power within them, by fretting over what might happen to-morrow; then, the call suddenly coming, find ourselves saved indeed perhaps, but occupying a lower place in heaven forever, because in troubling our hearts over the burdens of a to-morrow that never came we lost the grace of to-day. Every grace given us here is transmuted into glory there. Let us not lose one of them, for the graces proffered and accepted here are pledges of the measure of the heavenly glory that will be ours.[[17]]
IV. God's Sympathy
But, do what we will, after all, the best and only unfailing refuge from the snare of a false solicitude is to turn in these anxious moments to Him with Whom alone true sympathy is found. With profit may we hearken to the warning of the blessed à Kempis: "By mutual speech we seek mutual comfort, and desire to ease the heart overwearied with manifold anxieties..... But, alas, often in vain and to no end; for this outward comfort is no small loss of inward and divine consolation."[[18]]
In our solicitude we desire, and rightly desire, human sympathy, and God means us to have it. It was for this very thing that He sent His Son to take our nature and a human heart, full of warm love and sympathy, that we might find in perfection that for which we yearn,—the tender sympathy of our own kind. What sweet and strong consideration for our weakness is shown in this. Mere human sympathy only enervates, and in the end the soul is left weaker than before. Every man's experience has told him this, and yet deep in the human heart there is that uncontrollable longing for the loving touch of another heart, human like our own. God sees this, and condescends to it. He takes humanity, full and complete, up into the Godhead, that in Him we may find that human Heart that will give us perfectly the comfort and sympathy for which we yearn.
So in our solicitude let us turn to Him, our Elder Brother, and the disciple who lay on His breast at Supper will have no more loving a welcome, no sweeter a sympathy, than that which He will give to us who are wearied with the burden of life's warfare, and perplexed with the problems of the battle.
[[1]] Imitation, I, xiii.