| The Joy of Service |
Chapter 19 |
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This incident has its suggestions concerning the cost and sacredness of motherhood. It is not easy to be a mother, and to bring up a family of children, especially in plain circumstances, where the burdens of household care rest heavily on the mother herself. We should honour the marks which tell the story of what love has done. The dearest things in our mother should be the lines in which the record of her love is kept. Sometimes children forget this. They see that the mother’s face has lost something of its freshness, that she has not her old alertness and vivacity, and that her hands are wrinkled; but they do not remember that these signs of decay or wasting of strength and beauty are the furrows which love for them has ploughed. Instead of being considered marring or blemishes, they should be regarded as insignia of honour, like the soldier’s scars gotten in fighting for his country.
But the incident suggests also in a larger way how character is made. The word character meant originally the lines, furrows, or scratches which the engraver made upon the metal. In life, character consists of the impressions left, the tracks cut in the soul, by experiences. A baby has no character; its life is like a smooth tablet with nothing yet engraved upon it. At once, however, the record begins to be made. Education, influence, the impacts of other lives, joys, sorrows, successes, and failures, all leave their touches, their lines of beauty or of marring, their furrows of suffering; and at length, in mature years, the man stands among men with a character distinctively his own, the composite product of all the varied experiences of his whole life.
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