HER ONE TALENT | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA · Jan 9, 1907

HER ONE TALENT.

MARGARET E. SANGSTER tells of a woman neither young, nor beautiful, nor robust, nor accomplished, nor educated, who became a bride. She realized that she was extremely unlike her brilliant husband. “I have not even one talent to fold away in a napkin,” she said. But the husband loved her, and she loved him, and would, please God, make him happy.

“There is one comfort—I can keep house,” she said. So she planned the delicate, dainty, healthful meals, and kept the home clean, but not forbiddingly spotless. It invited the tired husband to rest, to litter it with books and papers, if it pleased him to bring work home from the office, while she sat beside him ready to smile or speak as he looked up.

The husband said one day: “There’s one talent you have, darling, beyond any one else in the world—the talent of having time enough for everything.” His home was a suburb of paradise, and he went forth to the competitions of life steadily successful in all his enterprises. And the quiet wife, who had time to love him, to share his hopes, listen to his plans, and make his life supremely happy, was an element in his success which counted more largely than even the husband knew.

It is rare to find in this hurrying world a being who works with an air of repose; who can pause to listen to another’s story; who has a heart touched to so responsive a key that sympathy in a friend’s good fortune is as ready as pity for a friend’s calamity.

This woman, who had the one talent of doing fully and blithely every home obligation, by degrees became a social power. A large class of girls each Sabbath bent eagerly around her while she unfolded the lesson to them, and upon stated occasions she entertains the poor, pale, fagged-out girls of the down-town factories, and keeps them by kindly word and helpful ministry and a Christian example, from places of temptation, for she believes it as much a Christian work to keep young girls pure as to save the poor remnant of their ruined lives after they have fallen.

Telling the life-story of this woman, Mrs. Sangster says: “Altogether, when I think of the sick beds this little woman sits by, the heartaches she soothes, the confidences of which she is the trusted recipient, the happy home-life which is hers, and the good she is doing, silently, I am quite sure her talent is bearing interest for the Master.”—Sunday-School Lesson Illustrator.