God’s Plow
There are times in one’s life when all the world seems to turn against us. Our motives are misunderstood, our words are misconstrued, a malicious smile or an unkind word reveals to us the unfriendly feelings of others. Our advances are repulsed, or met with icy coldness; a dry refusal arrests in our lips the offer of help.
Oh! how hard it all seems, and the more so, that we cannot divine the cause.
Courage, patience, poor disconsolate one! God is making a furrow in your heart, where He will surely sow His grace.
It is rare when injustice, or slights patiently borne, do not leave the heart at the close of the day filled with marvelous joy and peace. It is the seed God has sown springing up and bearing fruit
—Anon.
Two Singers
One touched his facile lyre to please the ear
And win the bussing plaudits of the town,
And sang a song that caroled loud and dear;
And gained at once a blazing, brief renown.
Nor he, nor all the crowd behind them, saw
The ephemeral list of pleasant rhymers dead:
Their voices once deemed a title without flaw
To fame, whose phantom radiance long had fled.
Another sang his soul out to the stars,
And the deep hearts of men. The few who passed
Heard a low, thoughtful strain behind his bare,
As of some captive in a prison cast.
And when that thrilling voice no more was heard,
Him from his cell in funeral pomp they bore;
Then all that he had sung and written stirred
The world’s great heart with thoughts unknown before.
—C. P. Cranch.
Alternate Reading: Hebrews 4:1-16.