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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: December 27th

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REMEMBER AND BE THANKFUL

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee. - Deuteronomy 8:2

There are few of us who have much time for retrospect, and there is a very deep sense in which it is wise to "forget the things that are behind," for the remembrance of them may burden us with a miserable entail of failure, may weaken us by vain regrets, may unfit us for energetic action in the living and available present. But oblivion is foolish if it is continual, and a remembered past has treasures in it which we can little afford to lose. It is hard to recognise our Father God in the bustle and hurry of our daily life, and the meaning of each event can only be seen when it is seen in its relation to the rest of a life. Just as a landscape, which we may look at without the smallest perception of its beauty, becomes another thing when the genius of a painter puts it on canvas, and its symmetry and proportion become more manifest, and an ethereal clearness broods over it, and its colors are seen to be deeper than our eyes had discerned, so the common events of life, trivial and insignificant while they are passing, become, when painted on the canvas of memory, nobler and greater, and we understand them more completely than we can do whilst they are passing.

We need to be at the goal in order to judge of the road. The parts are only explicable when we see the whole. The full interpretation of to-day is reserved for eternity. But, by combining and massing and presenting the consequences of the apparently insignificant and isolated events of the past, memory helps us to a clearer perception of God and a better understanding of our own lives. On the mountain summit a man can look down all along the valley by which he has wearily plodded, and understand the meaning of the divergences in the road, and the rough places do not look quite so rough when their proportion to the whole is a little more clearly in his view.

Only, if we are wisely to exercise remembrance, and to discover God in the lives which, whilst they are passing, had no perception of Him, we must take into account what the meaning of all life is - that is, to make men of us after the pattern of His will.

"Not enjoyment, and not sorrow.

Is our destined end or way."

But the growth of Christ-like and God-pleasing character is the Divine purpose, and should be the human aim of all lives. Our tasks, our joys, our sorrows, our gains, our losses - these are all but the scaffolding, and the scaffolding is only there in order that course upon course may rise the temple - palace of a spirit, devoted to, shaped and inhabited by, our Father, God.

It is possible to remember vanished joys, and to confer upon them by remembrance a kind of gentle immortality; and, thus remembered, they are ennobled, for all the gross material body of them, as it were, is got rid of, and only the fine spirit is left. The roses bloom, and over bloom, and drop, but a poignant perfume is distilled from the fallen petals. The departed are greatened by distance; when they are gone, we recognise the angels that we entertained unawares: and that recognition is no illusion, but it is the disclosure of the real character, to which they were sometimes untrue and we were often blind.

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