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Go Back and Do It

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 24, 1916

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 93, No. 42.

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Go Back and Do It

By William Byron Forbush

YESTERDAY morning an old, beggarly-looking man was standing beside the stairway that led to an elevated railway station, seemingly bewildered. I was in a hurry, and did not ask him where he wanted to go. Why didn’t I go back and do it?
My mother used to take great pains to think of lovely little surprises for me, and I used to take them as a matter of course. I see now how happy she could have been if I had ever thanked her. It is too late for me now to go back and do it.
I had a schoolmaster in a country school who fitted me for college more thoroughly than many a boy is fitted in a larger and more famous school. Often when I was in college I had good reason to thank him for his patience with me, but I never did. And it is now too late for me to go back and do it.
My chum did more for me than anybody else when I was a student; he was so honest and genuine and sensible, and so full of fine, manly purposes, and I was so much younger than he, and needed him so much. Every day of my life I am thankful for him, and I often tell others what he did for me, but I never told him. And now it is too late for me to go back and do it.
Tomorrow somebody else will do me a kindness. I shall be hurried and forgetful, but perhaps the memory of some kindnesses done by those of the past may make me willing to pass them on to those who are to come. And even if I hurry by, and feel timid about opening my heart by saying an appreciative word, still I can go back and do it.
Tomorrow somebody else will wave a hand to me or speak friendly about the weather in passing. Perhaps I shall remember that I shall not forever walk this friendly road, and that the number who wave to me is not unlimited. Even if I have passed them by without giving a sign of brotherhood, perhaps because they are poor or humble or because I myself am shy, still I can go back and do it.
I have yet some friends who mean more to me than any other friends I have ever had. They are close to me, and some of them are in the house where I live. I shudder to think that I might die or they might die before I have said to them all that is in my heart. I haven’t done it yet, but, thank God, I can still go back and do it.—William Byron Forbush, Ph. D., in Young People.