The Day

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 5, 1910

When Mrs. King’s friends heard that she had had a stroke of paralysis, and, although she would probably partially recover, could never again be her old active self, they looked at each other in dismay. Rebecca King, who never had known sickness in her life, who had been for thirty years the most active worker in the church, the most hospitable and generous hostess in town! “How will she endure it?” they cried.

It was several weeks before she was allowed to see any one. When at last she had been promoted to an invalid’s chair, and the doctor said that her friends might go to her, they confessed to each other that they dreaded it greatly. “If it were any one but Rebecca King!” they said.

But they went at once. They returned, those first callers, with strange faces. When others asked how Rebecca “took it,” they only said, “Go and see her.” And the others, going in their turn, found exactly the same Rebecca King.

That was the marvel of it, that she should be just the same—just as full of good cheer and shrewd common sense, she whose very life had been, they supposed, bound up in her activities. Somebody asked her about it, finally. Rebecca King’s cheerful face became grave for a moment.

“O, I had my struggle,” she said. “I had all I wanted lying there those two months. But one day it came to me that I wasn’t fair. I had lived fifty-five years and scarcely known a day of sickness and only one great sorrow. Not many persons could say that. So now if God thought it was time to send me into battle, why should I complain?”

“Had I ever shown any particular gratitude for those years? Here was my chance now.

“Then, lying there, I thought of my grandmother who was blind for twenty years before her death, and when people asked her how she kept so bright and happy, she had but one answer: ‘I’ve made a real good friend of my memory.’”

“It came to me that I’d been too busy all my life to get much acquainted with my memory, but I had a chance now; and the more I think back, the more I realize how much I’ve had that I never took time to be grateful for before.”

She reached her good hand under her pillow and drew out a little book, from between the pages of which fell a newspaper clipping; she passed it over to her friend. “That tells it better than I can,” she said, “I believe I’m living that right along now.”

The friend read it; it was very brief—merely two short stanzas:—

“I know the night is near ’at hand, The mists lie low on hill and bay. The autumn sheaves are dewless, dry, But I have had the day.

“Yes, I have had, dear Lord, the day. When at thy call I have the night, Brief be the twilight as I pass From light to dark, from dark to light.”

—Selected.