Nursing Troubles by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 17, 1872

Nursing Troubles.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

Some persons spend all their lives nursing troubles as carefully as a mother would a sick baby. I know of just such persons, always whining, complaining, fretting, over—what? some little ache or pain, or imaginary trouble. Nothing but supreme selfishness is at the bottom of it. They have no burden for others. Self occupies all their thoughts and attention. Their lives are just the opposite of Christ’s. They forget all else but self. Poor deceived souls! They live in a perfect hell here, and will fare worse still in the world to come. Of them a writer says:

“Some people are as careful of their troubles as mothers are of their babies; they cuddle them, and rock them, and hug them, and cry over them, and fly into a passion with you if you try to take them away from them; they want you to fret with them, and to help them to believe that they have been worse treated than anybody else. If they could, they would have a picture of their griefs in a golden frame, hung over the mantle-shelf for everybody to look at. And their griefs ordinarily make them selfish—they think more of their dear little trouble in the basket and in the cradle than they do of all the world besides.”

D. M. CANRIGHT.