| The Beauty of Self Control |
Chapter 13 |
Page 4 |
When we accept Christ’s friendship and let his love into our hearts, infinite possibilities of blessing are ours. Christ becomes our teacher, our guide, our burden-bearer, our very life. We are transformed through his influence. Loving him makes our dull lives radiant. A missionary teacher of Tokyo tells of a Japanese woman who came to speak about having her daughter received into the school for girls which the teacher was conducting. She asked if only beautiful girls were admitted. “No,” was the reply; “we take any girl who desires to come.” “But,” continued the woman, “All your girls that I have seen are very beautiful.” The teacher replied, “We tell them of Christ, and seek to have them take him into their hearts, and this makes their faces lovely.” The woman answered, “Well, I do not want my daughter to become a Christian, but I am going to send her to your school to get that look in her face.”
Christ is the sweetener and beautifier of the lives and the very faces of those who become his friends. He gives them peace, and peace brightens and transforms their features. He teaches them love, and love makes them beautiful. A girl who was very homely, so homely that even her mother told her she never would have any friends, determined to make her life so winning by its graciousness and its ministry of kindness that her homeliness would be forgotten. She gave herself to Christ in a simple and complete devotion and sought to be wholly under his influence. She then devoted herself to the helping and serving of others, until she was known everywhere as the angel of the town where she lived. Her ugliness of features was forgotten in the beauty of her disposition and life. That is what having Christ for a friend does for those who yield themselves to his transforming influence.
In no other experience in life is the blessing of the friendship of Christ more wonderful than in the times of affliction and trouble. “It is worth our thought,” says Bishop Huntington, “how small the audience would be that would assemble weekly, life through, to listen to a gospel that had nothing to say to sufferers. Poor, weak, broken hearts, staggering under their loads, would refuse a comforter who had never wept himself, nor remembered that his followers must weep. A religion that addressed itself only to those who are in a state of comfort would be like a system of navigation calculated only for clear weather, and giving no aid when night and cloud have wiped out all way marks from earth and sky, and the tempest shrieks in the darkness over an unknown sea.”
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