| The Beauty of Self Control |
Chapter 15 |
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Poetry is supposed to be more beautiful than prose. It is characterized by fineness and loftiness of thought and by charm and beauty of expression. It is not merely something in rhyme, as some writers seem to think. There are rhymes that do not make poetry. A life that is God’s poem should be very beautiful. We may not be able to write poetry, like Tennyson’s, that will charm by its music and by its beauty, but we may live poems. We may not be able to write twenty third psalms, but we can live them. We may make our life a sweet song. We do not need to be poets to do this. A very prosaic man may live so that gentle music shall breathe from his life all his days. He needs only to be true and just and loving. There are people whose lives are so sweet, so patient, so gentle, so thoughtful, so unselfish, so helpful, and so full of quiet goodness, that they are exquisite poems. They may be plain, simple, without fame, without show, without brilliance, but the marks of God’s hands are on them.
We are God’s poems. Every beautiful life is a poem. There are people, living in conditions of hardness; whose lives we would say could not possibly have any music in them. Their circumstances are utterly prosaic, with no room for sentiment. Even home tenderness would appear to be impossible in their experiences of toil, poverty, and pinching. Yet even such lives as these, doomed to heavy work and dreary hardship, or constant pain, ofttimes do become poems in their beauty and winningness. There are many men who never have an hour’s leisure or a bit of luxury in all their years, who yet please God continually by their faithfulness, their patience, their contentment, the peace of Christ in their hearts, whose lives are lovely songs. You may not find these poems in homes of luxury and splendour. There is more joy ofttimes in the plain cottages of those who are poor and love God than in the mansions of the rich who care not for God. Their lives are poems. We find them as we go about these days, sometimes in sick rooms, uncomplaining, unmurmuring, singing in suffering; sometimes in experiences of loss and want, patient, trusting. In many a lowly home you will find poems finer than ever you read in books. The mother of Goethe used to say that when her son had a grief he turned it into a poem. He who knows the secret, may turn all his troubles into poems.
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