It is the ailment of the world, this idea that "greatness" lies "over there". I'm almost ashamed to say that it took me years to understand that wherever I find myself is precisely where God has something for me to do. Not over there, but here.
I would add to that the simple idea that if a person still draws breath in this world there is yet something for that person to do in God's plan that hasn't yet been done. If you're still here, IOW, there's something for you to do. That one I learned very young, however, indirectly from my great-grandmother.
She lived to be 96, and in her later years she suffered from goiter, blindness, and the impossibility of getting around by herself. I remember being in the living room one day, where "Grandma G" was always escorted to an easy chair early in the day and pretty much left there until bedtime, when I heard her say to herself, "Why am I still here, God? Why don't you take me home?" Only a few minutes later another and younger of her great-grandchildren came running into the room, saw "Grandma G" sitting there, walked over and climbed into her lap, and said, "Tell me one of your stories, Grandma!" Do I really need to say that her stories were always of her youth on the frontier, and were packed with history and wisdom? Grandma G still had something to do.
I don't know anything at all about "greatness," but I do know that whatever life has for me, it's right here.
Thanks again, W.M.
I remember, not many years ago, a young theological student who came into my office and said to me that he thought it was his duty to come in and "labor with me." I asked him what had happened, and he said: "I feel it is my duty to come in and speak to you, sir, and say that the Holy Scriptures declare that money is the root of all evil." I asked him where he found that saying, and he said he found it in the Bible. I asked him whether he had made a new Bible, and he said, no, he had not gotten a new Bible, that it was in the old Bible. "Well," I said, "if it is in my Bible, I never saw it. Will you please get the textbook and let me see it?"He left the room and soon came stalking in with his Bible open, with all the bigoted pride of the narrow sectarian, who founds his creed on some misinterpretation of Scripture, and he puts the Bible down on the table before me and fairly squealed into my ear, "There it is. You can read it for yourself." I said to him, "Young man, you will learn, when you get a little older, that you cannot trust another denomination to read the Bible for you." I said, "Now, you belong to another denomination. Please read it to me, and remember that you are taught in a school where emphasis is exegesis." So he took the Bible and read it: "The love of money is the root of all evil." Then he had it right.
The Great Book has come back into the esteem and love of the people, and into the respect of the greatest minds of earth, and now you can quote it and rest your life and your death on it without more fear. So, when he quoted right from the Scriptures he quoted the truth. "The love of money is the root of all evil." Oh, that is it. It is the worship of the means instead of the end. Though you cannot reach the end without the means. When a man makes an idol of the money instead of the purposes for which it may be used, when he squeezes the dollar until the eagle squeals, then it is made the root of all evil. Think, if you only had the money, what you could do for your wife, your child, and for your home and your city. Think how soon you could endow the Temple College yonder if you only had the money and the disposition to give it; and yet, my friend, people say you and I should not spend the time getting rich. How inconsistent the whole thing is. We ought to be rich, because money has power.
When a man makes an idol of the money instead of the purposes for which it may be used, when he squeezes the dollar until the eagle squeals, then it is made the root of all evil. Think, if you only had the money, what you could do for your wife, your child, and for your home and your city.