Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith, “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half: trust God: see all, nor be afraid.”
The artist was trying to improve on a dead mother’s picture. It showed lines and wrinkles, and he wanted to take them out, so as to make the portrait more beautiful. But the son said, “No; don’t take out the lines; just leave them every one. It wouldn’t be my mother if all the lines were gone.”
He said it was well enough for young people who had never known a care to have a picture with a face smooth fair, without wrinkles; but when one has lived seventy years, years of earnest and noble life, full of suffering, toil, struggle, and self denial, it would be like lying to cover up their track.
Then the young man went on to speak in detail of some of the burdens which his mother had borne, the sacrifices she had made, and the sufferings and sorrows which had furrowed her life. He did not want a picture with the story of all these years taken out of the face. Its very beauty was in the marks and lines which told of what the mother’s brave heart and faithful hands had done for love’s sake.
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