| Finding the Way |
Chapter 3 |
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We put our cares into God’s hands, with a prayer that He will free us from the load. But the cares do not seem to become any less. We think there has been no answer to our prayer. Yet all the while an unseen hand has been shaping, adjusting, disentangling the complex affairs of our life, and preparing a blessing for us out of them all. We are not conscious of it, but our prayer has been receiving continual answer. Like the tapestry weavers, we have not seen the unfolding of the pattern as we have wrought away in the darkness, and yet on the other side, where God’s eye sees, it has been coming out in beauty. Some day we shall know that many prayers we now think unanswered have really been most graciously answered.
There are prayers, however, which are not answered. For example, we ask God to lift away our burden. He hears our pleading and His heart is warm with love; yet, to do this would be to rob us of blessings which can come to us only through the bearing of the burden. There are mistaken notions current among good people about the way God helps. Some think that whenever they have a little trouble, a bit of hard path to walk over, a load to carry, a sorrow to meet, a trial of any kind, all they have to do is to call upon God and He will take away that which is hard, or prevent that which impends, freeing them altogether from the trial. But this is not God’s usual way. His purpose concerning us is not to make things easy for us, but rather to make something of us. So when we ask Him to save us from our care, to take the struggle out of our life, to make the path mossy for our feet, to lift off the heavy load, He simply does not do it. It really would be most unkind and unloving in Him to do so. It would be giving us an easier path today instead of a mountain vision tomorrow. Therefore, prayers of this kind go unanswered. We must carry the burden ourselves. We must climb the steep path to stand on the radiant peak. God want us to learn life’s lessons, and to do this we must be left to work out the problems for ourselves.
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