Trust in God Versus the Restless Meteor
What could be more strongly contrasted than the quiet dependence of the trusting soul in Him who careth for the birds, and “so clothes the lilies” that Solomon, in all his glory, was not “arrayed like one of these,” and the discontent, the over-anxiety, and restless dissatisfaction of one who is only lifted up on high, and shines, and glares, and moves, and rushes wildly on, like a fitful meteor, and shares at last the meteor’s fate? Selfishness, which creates so many artificial necessities for itself, and which is miserable in proportion to its anxiety over fancied wants, shapes this meteoric character into many forms. It glows with splendors only to burst into a thousand pieces with the force of its own momentum. It blazons its fiery pathway through the air only to end it in the deepest darkness of its own disappointments. It never takes its place among the shining worlds that go out from God’s pavilion, but it flares among them with a transient brilliancy that for a moment may eclipse them, while they shine on when it is lost in midnight. “Consider the ravens!” “Consider the lilies!” “Neither be ye meteors.”