Yet you may live a great life

“You may be very discontented with yourself… no genius, have no brilliant gifts… are inconspicuous… mediocrity is the law of your existence…  Your days are remarkable for nothing but sameness and insipidity. Yet you may have a great life.”

Well that started out on a refreshing note, didn’t it? But then I continued to read and came to the author of the section I was reading.  Humbled that I thought it was a tough read, and, yes, a convicting one.  This, from the Streams in the Desert devotional, a daily reading habit I’ve taken up again. (note: Sift some entries if you take up reading this devotional) The section was quoted material from the writings of George Matheson.  And then I continued to read the deeply instructive passage and gleaned a great deal from it – maybe more now that I’m sharing it with you than I understood, initially.

The same George Matheson who wrote perhaps one of the most beautiful hymns ever penned.  The same George Matheson who became blind at the age of twenty – a writer, a minister of the gospel… never married, blind. Blind but saw more than I see today.

The passage continued, “Be willing to be only a voice, heard but not seen… Do the commonest and smallest things as beneath His eye…. If you have made a great mistake in your life, do not let it becloud all of it; but, locking the secret in your breast, compel it to yield strength and sweetness.  We’re doing more good than we know, sowing seed, starting streamlets, giving men true thoughts of Christ, to which they’ll refer one day…”

All of these things gave birth to the affirmation of the truth that the love of God will not let us go.  O, what a Saviour.  O, Love that will not let me go!

♥

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go
George Matheson

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O Light that foll’west all my way,
I yield my flick’ring torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.

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