BARNACLES OR BALLAST—WHICH?
THERE are many good souls who are always worried and troubled over their burdens. Sometimes these burdens are infirmities of body, perhaps long and sore sickness. Sometimes it is having sickness in one's family. Sometimes on the part of a Christian man it is a wife who is not spiritual, who does not sympathize with him or his work for God, who demands unduly his attention and service, who in one way or another would lead him to compromise principle or violate conscience. And sometimes a wife is similarly circumstanced. Sometimes it is but the little untoward incidents of life that lead to self-sympathy and selfish mourning. Now God suffers all these to come; and it rests with us as to whether they shall profit us or not. Shall they be to us barnacles or ballast? Shall we have them inside or outside? Shall they prove helpful or hindering? "Behold, the ships!" they have their lessons. You have seen some noble craft carrying full sail or steam, with easy load, barely creeping along a smooth sea, making, perhaps, but three to five knots an hour. What is the matter? Her bottom is "foul;" she is covered with barnacles. Millions of little crustaceans, or shell-fish, have fastened themselves to that part of the ship below the water, forming great rough, irregular masses and protuberances which greatly impede her progress. That ship needs to go into dry-dock and be scraped and cleaned. It is poor seamanship to go on in that way, if possible to prevent it. And we would call it worse still if all that mass of barnacles was broken from the ship and piled on the deck till the ship became so top-heavy that she foundered in the first storm. Yet there are human craft that do that very thing. Again, you see a clean, beautiful boat tie up to some wharf and take on tons and tons and tons of worthless rock, stowing them away in the deepest part of the hold. She sinks lower when she leaves the wharf than when she came, and you wonder why she loaded up with stone. The secret is revealed when she meets the severe storm at sea. Then she rides safely. That worthless stone is ballast, needed to keep her upright, or to enable her ever to right herself in time of storm.5 It rests with us to say whether our burdens shall be barnacles or ballast, whether they shall hinder or help. It rests with us whether they shall, in self-sympathy or boastfulness, be exploited as great burdens and prove our destruction, or whether we shall let them come clear down into the secret places of our hearts, taking them as permitted of God, perhaps precious burdens sent of God, but, by His grace, always blessings, to keep us humble and upright; yea, lodestones through which the magnetism of His goodness draws us upward and onward to the eternal goal. O, to learn the lesson, "We know that to them that love God, God worketh all things with them for good!" Shall the burden be barnacles or ballast?