NOT WORK BUT WORRY by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 20, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 20.

NOT WORK BUT WORRY.

By Editor

At this time in the end of the ages, when intensity is taking possession of everything below, it is good to read words like the following, reproduced from the Advance for the benefit of hurrying readers:—

“And in all the activities of modern life we see many evidences of hurry. In education we are too fond of short cuts and partial courses. In reading we give more time to the happenings of the day than to the treasures of the centuries. In social life there is a lack of repose. In married life extreme nervous irritability—not to call it some unkinder name—often prepares the way for divorce bills soon after the wedding bells have ceased to ring. Many Christians are so constantly occupied with secular affairs that they can not, or do not, 'take time to be holy;' and in all departments of life, leisurely completeness is almost a lost art.

Now there is nothing more exhausting to both body and soul than unnatural speed. Work is God's grandest tonic this side of heaven, and one should drink his fill of it as long as life lasts; but hurry, and its twin brother, worry, fill many untimely graves. What a sad chronicle one could compile from the yearly files of the daily papers, of ministers, journalists, lawyers, merchants, professors, workers in all professions and callings, who were spurred forward by the spirit of our times until brawn and brain could endure the strain no longer, and they dropped dead in their tracks, or, sadder still, with maniacal hand pulled down the shattered temple of life!

But this is not God's method of activity, either for himself or for his children. In creation and in redemption he did not hurry events at the expense of completeness; and, instead of hurrying the great workers of the world, he gives them ample time for preparation and performance. We see this in the lives of Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist, and Paul. We see it also in the greatest Worker of all the time—Jesus. Not only did he tarry at Nazareth until he was thirty years old, but in those three years of public activity, tho he was charged with a work greater than the creation of a universe, yet we see in his life no incompleteness because of hurry. He found time to spend entire nights in prayer, time to heal, to teach, to give himself without stint to every suppliant, however humble; time to take nature into his confidence and to get from her materials for the making of parables; time, when he was betrayed, to touch and heal the ear of smitten Malchus; time, while dying on the cross, to pray for his enemies, to commit his mother to the care of John, to save the penitent thief; and at the supreme moment when he arose from the sleep of death, he, or some leisurely spirit, found time to fold and lay aside the napkin which loving hands had wrapped around his thorn-scarred head.

And we, like him, may escape from the fever and fret of life by allying our souls with eternal verities. How earnest Jesus was, yet how calm! He can give rest, for it is in him. He can offer peace, for his quiet soul is its fountain-head. Let us walk with him day by day, and he will teach us how to do much without needless hurry; to live much without wearing intensity; to rest much, because we may rest in the Lord continually.