Читать книгу Spiritual Energies in Daily Life - Rufus M. Jones - Страница 9

Table of Contents

There are many things which we want—things for which we struggle hard and toil painfully. Like the little child with his printed list for Santa Claus, we have our list, longer or shorter, of precious things which we hope to see brought within our reach before we are gathered to our fathers. The difference is that the child is satisfied if he gets one thing which is on his list. We want everything on ours. The world is full of hurry and rush, push and scramble, each man bent on winning some one of his many goals. But, in spite of this excessive effort to secure the tangible goods of the earth, it is nevertheless true that deep down in the heart most men want the peace of God. If you have an opportunity to work your way into that secret place where a man really lives, you will find that he knows perfectly well that he is missing something. This feeling of unrest and disquiet gets smothered for long periods in the mass of other aims, and some men hardly know that they have such a thing as an immortal soul hidden away within. But, even so, it will not remain quiet. It cries out like the lost child who misses his home. When the hard games of life prove losing ones, when the stupidity of striving so fiercely for such bubbles comes over him, when a hand from the dark catches away the best earthly comfort he had, when the genuine realities of life assert themselves over sense, he wakes up to find himself hungry and thirsty for something which no one of his earthly pursuits has supplied or can supply. He wants God. He wants peace. He wants to feel his life founded on an absolute reality. He wants to have the same sort of peace and quiet steal over him which used to come when as a child he ran to his mother and had all the ills of life banished from thought in the warm love of her embrace.

But it is not only the driving, pushing man, ambitious for wealth and position, who misses the best thing there is to get—the peace of God. Many persons who are directly seeking it miss it. Here is a man who hopes to find it by solving all his difficult intellectual problems. When he can answer the hard questions which life puts to him, and read the riddles which the ages have left unread, he thinks his soul will feel the peace of God. Not so, because each problem opens into a dozen more. It is a noble undertaking to help read the riddles of the universe, but let no one expect to enter into the peace of God by such a path. Here is another person who devotes herself to nothing but to seeking the peace of God. Will she not find it? Not that way. It is not found when it is sought for its own sake. He or she who is living to get the joy of divine peace, who would “have no joy but calm,” will probably never have the peace which passeth understanding. Like all the great blessings, it comes as a by-product when one is seeking something else. Christ’s peace came to him not because he sought it, but because he accepted the divine will which led to Gethsemane and Calvary. Paul’s peace did not flow over him while he was in Arabia seeking it, but while he was in Nero’s prison, whither the path of his labors for helping men had led him. He who forgets himself in loving devotion, he who turns aside from his self-seeking aims to carry joy into any life, he who sets about doing any task for the love of God, has found the only possible road to the permanent peace of God.

There are no doubt a great many persons working for the good of others and for the betterment of the world who yet do not succeed in securing the peace of God. They are in a frequent state of nerves; they are busy here and there, rushing about perplexed and weary, fussy and irritable. With all their efforts to promote good causes, they do not quite attain the poise and calm of interior peace. They are like the tumultuous surface of the ocean with its combers and its spray, and they seldom know the deep quiet like that of the underlying, submerged waters far below the surface. The trouble with them is that they are carrying themselves all the time. They do not forget themselves in their aims of service. They are like the ill person who is so eager to get well that he keeps watching his tongue, feeling his pulse, and getting his weight. Peace does not come to one who is watching continually for the results of his work, or who is wondering what people are saying about it, or who is envious and jealous of other persons working in the same field, or who is touchy about “honor” or recognition. Those are just the attitudes which frustrate peace and make it stay away from one’s inner self.

There is a higher level of work and service and ministry, which, thank God, men like us can reach. It is attained when one swings out into a way of life which is motived and controlled by genuine sincere love and devotion, when consecration obliterates self-seeking, when in some measure, like Christ, the worker can say without reservations, “Not my will but thine be done.”