A Modern Tale - and Its Moral

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 18, 1908

A Modern Tale — and Its Moral

ONE OF OUR MISSIONARIES

It was in the heart of a heathen land. For several days the tom-toms had been beating by day and night in connection with some heathen festival. During the day the fierce rays of the sun beat pitilessly down. At night the air was stiflingly still, and one lay and tossed in fitful sleep, awaking in the morning without that rested, refreshed feeling enjoyed by friends on the other side of the world,—for it was winter there.

Patiently enduring this, was a tired wife and mother, not long since arrived in the midst of all to her so new and strange. Her heart was bravely trying to bear it with resignation for the sole purpose of telling these people of the love of Jesus as revealed in the third angel’s message. But it was a struggle, for a sensitive heart always recoils from that which is strange and new and degraded. Then the heat had made the children cross and fretful, and husband was not able to enter fully into her feelings. As afterward proved, the germs of tropical malaria, with their peculiar depressing power, were beginning a battle with her system.

Do you wonder that the heavens above seemed almost like brass, and the parched, blistered earth beneath like iron?

But lo, suddenly, unexpectedly, there come in through the door, in the early morning, two messages from girl friends across the seas. Just simple, breezy, chatty letters full of good cheer, news of loved ones, and the folk of former days. “As cold refreshing water,” indeed, did those letters come to that thirsty soul in this far country. The depression lifts. The nervous system relaxes. The sky is no longer brass. The struggle with the malaria germs is taken up with a cheerfulness that ends in their utter defeat. The arm of usefulness of one family in a dark and heathen land is strengthened. And all because of two letters written, perhaps, with but little thought of the good cheer they would bring.

The positive side of the lesson that this true tale conveys is not hard to interpret. But there is a negative side that needs emphasis. It has to do with the letters that have never been written. In a land of prosperity, surrounded by all material comforts, is your time so fully occupied with the many things that seem so important to you that you have not spared time to write such letters? If so that lonely warrior may have fainted under the stress of the struggle in the heat and burden of the day, for the want of the cool, refreshing draught your message of sympathy and love might have brought.

“It isn’t the thing you do, dear, It’s the thing you leave undone, Which gives you the bit of heartache At the setting of the sun. The tender word forgotten, The letter you did not write, The flower you might have sent, dear, Are your haunting ghosts to-night.”