| The Beauty of Self Control |
Chapter 15 |
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We get music into our lives when we live sweetly in hard circumstances and amid trying experiences. Anybody ought to be able to live songfully in summer days, with flowers strewn all along the path, with only gladness on every hand. But to live rejoicingly in the midst of discouragements, hindrances, and all manner of trouble, is a truer test. The papers some time since told of a ship coming over from Germany in midwinter with a cargo of many thousand song birds. At the beginning of the voyage the weather was warm and muggy. Not a bird sang in those days. Not a note of music was heard. The birds all seemed depressed and unhappy. But about the third day out it began to get colder, and soon the wind was blowing stiffly and there was stormy weather. Then the birds began to sing. Soon all the twenty five or thirty thousand little throats were pouring out song. People often say that if they had only ease and luxury all the time – costly furniture, sumptuous meals, automobiles – they would be gladder and would live more sweetly. But if our hearts are right we should sing all the better, the more joyously, when life is hard, when we have heavy tasks and sharp trials, keen losses and bitter sorrows. An invalid who loved to hear the birds sing at her window said she liked the robin best of all the birds because the robin sang in the rain.
There are some people who have not learned to sing in the rain. They are easily discouraged. Nehemiah wanted the Jews, who were rebuilding the Temple, to rejoice. They were disheartened, and he wanted them to sing. “The joy of the Lord is your strength,” he told them. They would be stronger if they would sing. They would get on better with their building. That is the way God wants us to do. He does not want them ever to be gloomy or unhappy. When the word of Christ dwells in them, the result will be “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” St. Paul puts it thus in another of his epistles, when he says, “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I will say, Rejoice.” That is, if you are a Christian, you should be a happy one. An unhappy Christian is not doing honour to Christ.
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