| The Joy of Service |
Chapter 21 |
Page 5 |
There is a better way – it is to seal one’s lips resolutely upon all words of complaining about one’s self, all talking about one’s discomforts or ailments. Nobody is really interested in such recital; no one enjoys listening to it. Even those who patiently hear your lugubrious tale do so only out of amiable courtesy. Speak only of the bright and cheerful things in your life. Tell others of your thousand mercies and not of your one or tow miseries. Find the pleasant things, and talk of these, rather than of the painful things. You have no right to add to the world’s disquietude by pouring out your story of woes, real or fancied. Give out cheer and gladness instead, and breathe out song.
It was said of a beautiful Christian woman, beside her coffin, that wherever she went the air was sweeter after she had gone by. It is such an influence we should all seek to leave behind us wherever we go. To do this we must train ourselves to consume our own selfishness, to repress our discontents, to bear in silence the trials and sufferings of our life, to endure in sweet patience the things that are disagreeable and unpleasant, and to give out to others and to the world only sweetness and light, however keen our own pain or heavy our burden.
“By the cynic, the sad, the fallen,
Who had no strength for the strife,
The world’s highway is cumbered today;
They make up the item of life.
But the virtue that conquers passion,
And the sorrow that hides in a smile,
It is these that are worth the homage of earth;
For we find them but once in a while.”
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