Doing One's Best
Back to Intimate Letters on Personal Problems
Dear friend,
I rejoice with you in the success you are having not only in your work — but personally. Evidently you have become the centre of a good influence which is reaching out and touching many other lives. I said last Sunday in speaking of work, that we are not first to be carpenters or doctors or artists or lawyers — but are, first of all, to be Christians.
Whatever we do in our ordinary secular work, if that is all there is of us — we are failing of our best. The life in us should pour out through our vocation, through all our ordinary work — and like fragrance, like the light, to bless the world. That is what you are doing. You are an artist and a teacher of art — but you are also far more. You are a Christian woman, with a heart full of love for Christ, which is always . . .
pouring out its gentle influences,
touching the lives of others,
sweetening homes,
warming hearts, and
inspiring people to live better, more beautifully, more worthily, more helpfully.
This is my little sermon for you this month. It is not a sermon — but a bit of encouragement. But I believe that encouragement is very often the best that we can give to our friends. I am sure that encouragement is far better for a child than nagging. Even some good fathers and mothers seem in their family discipline and in the exercise of their love for their children, never to get any further than "Don't."
I am interested very much in what you say about your "bird-man." There are some men who seem to have a genius for nature. Birds and animals of all kinds seem to know them and form friendships with them.
There are men who stay about our parks, only loafers or tramps, perhaps — but with whom the little animals are as familiar as a child would be with its own mother. Everyone has his own particular place in the world, and it may be that some of those we think of as entirely useless people, are really doing a good deal more for the blessing of the world than we imagine.
The last page of your letter amuses me. You say that you have sometimes felt quite like giving up your art, Sunday-school work and everything else. If this really is an accurate statement of your condition at any time in your life, it must be when you are very much exhausted, or when you have eaten something for your supper, which you ought not to have eaten. A great many of our unhappy moods, are the result of careless or indiscreet living.
If people would only learn not to overeat, not to eat when they should not eat, not to eat what they should not eat, and always to eat sparingly and non-indulgently — they would be a great deal better Christians and a great deal happier, and would do very much more work.
Back to Intimate Letters on Personal Problems