DAY BY DAY

Lake County Mail, Issue 32, 14 January 1948, Page 8

DAY BY DAY

From time to time there comes to most of us, I suppose, the idea of making a fresh start, along some sort of linos, bringing God a bit more into the business of life. New Year resolutions are sometimes of this sort —when we wake up on January 1 with all sorts of ideas which we hope to carry out during the year. It is amazing how generous God is with these opportunities for making such fresh beginnings isn’t it? Every day, every week, every month, every year, we can awake to newness of life. I do not mean necessarily that you will be doing a lot more church-going, though personally I think that is bound to arise sooner or later if we go on. Church-going is a development and a result of an attempt to live nearer to God, rather than its cause. But at any time and under any circumstances you or I or any of us may, and quite a lot of people do, decide to have another shot at living so far as we can, nearer to God’s desires and will for us., So many of us are very earnest in these new resolutions, we make them meaning to keep them, we really try, and then something crops up and the resolutions go by the board, and we think what is the use of going on? I cannot follow them through. Well in ease that happens —and being a parson, you will perhaps put up with me saying “ in the hope that it happens —-here are a couple of ideas that might help you to continue a bit longer than you have done previously. First, quite soon after you have made such a resolution, you will find presented to your mind very cleverly and cunningly a sort of vision of almost endless days and weeks and months —a sort of long corridor of infinite length and monotony —in which, as you look down it, you feel quite certain that you cannot possibly et keep straight ” all that time. This vision sometimes comes to us in another form, when one starts a new job, such as building a house or teaching or anything elsd —there is so much to be done, can I or you keep constantly on until it is completed, can we endure the set-backs of shortage of materials, and weather and so on, and still keep on. Can avc teach the children in our charge all that we would like them to learn before the exams? There are so many things that might interfere. Of course there is the old proverb about not crossing your bridges until you come to them —that is exactly it. All these difficulties and set-backs you

sec may bo true or they may not —the days and weeks and months stretching ahead, may turn out to be of great difficulty in keeping your resolutions — or they may not. They may be monotonous or they may not, one cannot tell until one comes to them; but they do not matter, yet at any rate, one has not come to them. What I am interested in* at the moment, all that I am aiming at the moment is to keep my proper relations with God until to-day is over. Then when tomorrow comes I will have a shot at seeing what I can make of it, and then the next day comes, I will have a shot at that, and so on. This is our Lord’s advice: “Take therefore no thought for to-morrow; for to-mor-row shall take thought for the things of itself.”

The other trick we shall come up against almost immediately is this, that if, despite all our efforts, we are unfortunate enough, or weak or bad enough, to spoil, say, Monday, the strange belief immediately gets us that we have spoilt the whole affair and its really not much use going on trying. Most of us have fallen for this idea but it is not really very clever. However

badly we spoil Monday, we cannot possibly have also spoilt Tuesday for we have not come to it yet—it is completely untouched. You see, eaeln day is something we can offer to Goo, something fulfilled as decently as we can, and if we have spoilt it, that is all the more, not all the less reason for making something better of the next ''one. No cook because he has served up a breakfast of badly burnt porridge and badly cooked chop, i« going to believe that that is a reason for taking no trouble over the next one —or if he does there is someone at hand who will let him know how wrong he is. Think these two ideas over will youf and apply them as requisite. “Lord for to-morrow and it’s need I do not pray, Keep me, my God, free from stain of sin, just for to-day.” PHILIP C. WILLIAMS,