| The Secrets of a Beautiful Life |
Chapter 9 |
Page 7 |
But we are now Christ’s disciples. All about us are hungry people. Christ has bread to give them — enough to satisfy all their hungers. But it must pass to them through our hands. What if the bread stop with us? What if we take it — this sacred bread, Christ’s own body broken for us — and eat it with relish, and sit down and think not of those just beyond us who are hungering for comfort, for help, for love, for life? This bread is not given to us for ourselves alone, — Christ gives no blessing in that way; it is given for ourselves, and then to be passed on by us to others. Says Amiel, “It is better to be lost then to be saved all alone.” And Susan Coolidge writes, using Amiel’s word as a motto:-
“To lie by the river of life and see it run to waste,
To eat of the tree of heaven while the nations go unfed,
To taste the full salvation — the only one to taste —
To live while the rest are lost — oh, better by far be dead!
For to share is the bliss of heaven, as it is the joy of earth;
And the unshared bread lacks savor, and the wine unshared lacks zest:
And the joy of the soul redeemed would be little, little worth,
If, content with its own security, it could forget the rest.”
So it is that we stand between Christ and a needy, hungry world. So it is that the bidding ever comes to us, “Give ye them to eat.” Let us be faithful. It would be a bitter thing, indeed, if any should perish because we did not carry to them the bread which the Master gives us for them.
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