A Cure for Trouble

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Sep 2, 1875

A Cure for Trouble.

MANY persons attempt to drown trouble in drink. You might as well attempt to drown a fish in the brook. It is the element in which trouble lives and thrives. Others nurse their trouble in idleness. They say, "I don't feel like doing anything." No doubt about that. The first effort of trouble is to absorb all your energies, and make you feel that all effort is difficult, perhaps useless. But it is effort that cures trouble. Work is the only certain remedy for it. If misfortune has come upon you, work must retrieve it. If sudden calamity has struck you hard, you must strike something else hard, or it will overpower you. If you have met with losses, you need all your energies to make them up, and these you cannot have if you lie awake thinking about your troubles. Every sleepless hour at night takes away the value of a waking and working hour by day.

There are some troubles which time only can heal, some, perhaps, which no time can heal, but there is no burden of trouble which will not be made lighter by good, hearty, honest work. Try it and see.

And remember that, as most of our troubles are caused by departing from duty and from God, there is no perfect cure for them until we penitently return to him who "binds up the broken heart," and who having been himself a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, knows better than any one else how "to comfort all that mourn."