Читать книгу Beyond the Horizon - Harry A. Renfree - Страница 25

January 19

Charlie Harvey, whom I know personally, was a missionary to Africa for many years. Among his many talents, he’s a good writer. In one of his books, he tells of entering a contest that required him, as a robust boy, to have a bath every day for a month. Back in the 1930s and 40s, such a ritual was almost unheard of, particularly on a New Brunswick farm.

Fittingly, the contest was sponsored by the Lifebuoy Soap Company, and contestants in that health and hygiene campaign were required to keep careful record of the hours they slept, the food they ate, and whether or not they brushed their teeth. “Then,” as he writes, “there was the one great obstacle.” With a free cake of Lifebuoy soap, they were supposed to take a bath every evening of the week. There was only one bathroom and one bath with running water in the entire village of Maugerville, New Brunswick, and unfortunately, not in their house. “It already,” he said, “took a lot of planning to accommodate the Saturday night baths for a family of six.” Since it was Charlie’s task to pump and carry in the water, his mother agreed to the contest, and the big red cake of soap was pressed into hygienic action every night. Charlie writes: “It was crazy and unheard of, but I did it.”

Unfortunately, when the ten–year–old boy took his completed chart to school, absolutely no one believed that he had done it—not even the teacher who was overseeing the contest, and the prize was given to someone else.

Charlie Harvey must have had very even–tempered parents, for some I know would have raised quite a ruckus at the teacher’s failure to treat their son fairly. However, Charlie says that although many years have gone by, he remembers that he had a bath every day and that he told the truth.5

Each one of us suffers the same difficulty from time to time: a truth we say is not believed, or we are misunderstood or even misinterpreted. Jesus Himself was not believed, but was misunderstood and misinterpreted. And for that, He died on the cross. In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that His followers would suffer similarly. “Blessed are you,” He said to His disciples, “when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven” (Matthew 5:11–12a).

That’s the only struggle that really counts.