EMPTIED FROM VESSEL TO VESSEL.
The following bit of heart-experience given to the writer years ago, is well worth repeating for the benefit of other tossed lives, and their number is legion. “It is the queerest thing.” “Well, then, it must be very queer,” said grandmother, with a twinkle in her deep-set eyes. “It is. Just as soon as I get settled comfortably anywhere or in anything, I have to be jostled, upset, tumbled out; I have not felt at home for a day and a night for seven years. If I am being punished, I am being dreadfully punished.” Grandmother peered at me over her glasses, but said not a word. I felt rebuked, but went on grumbling. “We thought we were settled in that lovely home in the country. John’s health was good there, and the children frisked like lambs; then that mortgage had to come, and it had to be paid off, and the lovely place had to be sold for three-quarters of what we paid for it, and we boarded awhile and were homeless. “I came nearer ‘nestling’ there than I ever did anywhere; then John exasperated me by quoting some old saint’s prayer: ‘Lord, when thou seest I am about to nestle, put a thorn in my nest.’ I told him that was the spirit of Pascal, who thrust iron spikes into his naked flesh; and I would none of it. Yet I did try to be thankful and humble, and then had to have my roof taken away from me. O, how it hurt; while I thought of the old saint’s prayer, and wondered if I had ‘nestled’! “And now this! We must give up this home. This is the third satisfying home I have had to give up in less than seven years.” I was not grumbling now; I was penitent and in tears. Grandmother did not look sharply at me; she kept her eyes on her darning. “Do you know what the Lord said about Moab, once?” About Moab! How she lived among those old names! The name suggested Ruth, nothing else.10 “Is he saying about me what he said about Moab?” I queried incredulous. “I will tell you and you can judge. It was my portion this morning. You know how full my life has been of changes. Your life reminds me of my own. If this truth may only mean to you what it means to me!” “I think I am ready for it, grandmother,” I said, touched by her voice. “I know you are. The Lord said this about Moab: ‘Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel.’” With what a light shone grandmother’s old eyes! “Now do you want to know what happened to him because he had not been emptied from vessel to vessel, because he had not been ‘jostled, upset, and tumbled out,’ like you? ‘Therefore his taste remained in him, and his scent is not changed.’ Do you want your natural ‘taste’ to remain in you, your natural ‘scent’ not to be changed? Do you want to be at ‘ease’ and not have the best blessings?” “But is it doing me good?” I murmured, remembering my discontent. “I am sure you love heaven as you never would do if earth were one unchanging comfortableness.” “I know it. I went to sleep last night glad that heaven would be a resting-place, even if earth pushed me about so.” “God has work for you to do in each place that he empties you into. He knows your tendency to ‘settle down.’ He knows how your heart needs to be uprooted, that it has a natural clinging to old places and old friends. He wants you to have a new taste and new scent. He sees some taste and some scent in you that he wants to change, and nothing but stirring you up by emptying you out will make that decided change. You will be pure and strong with his taste, if you let him work his changes in you. Isn’t it worth it?” It is worth it, yes. But, O, how hard it was to leave the home we had planned and builded, my sunshine-chamber, the family room, the garden we had planted, and the flowers that would bloom next year, when we were not there to see them! Such sunrises and such sunsets! Would the morning-star ever shine so golden through the rosy light anywhere on earth as I saw it this morning from my chamber window? But there was Moab with the unchanged scent and taste; and there would I be, with something in me that God did not love, something that stopped short of his idea of what he would make of me and with me, if he did not empty me from home to home. That was his way of changing me. “Yes,” was all I said, and then I went out into my pretty kitchen to get tea, and to hope that I would do God’s work more faithfully in my next new home. This is the story for the wanderers who “have here no continuing city.”—Cumberland Presbyterian.