Recently my thought has been more especially given to the word work, which seems to embody much, if not all, of life's problem. Good work demands diligence, faithfulness, patience — the patience that is necessary in sowing the good seed, knowing that it is "God who giveth the increase." As Christian Scientists, we need to learn the lesson of patience. We must know that if we are faithful in tilling the ground, then sowing the seed, God will govern the growth. With the thought of work and patience so strong, I received the following article, which a sister in Oregon cut from Harper's Bazar, thinking it was well worth sharing with others. It contains a strong lesson for every one, and needs no further comment than that all will read, ponder and profit by it.
Most of us get our ideas of Patience from that old-time picture where she sits as a bent and silent figure, with, meekly folded hands and downcast eyes. To women who are stirred to action by sight of need in others, such a figure has always inspired impatience and annoyance. "Why sit and wait, doing nothing," they have murmured, "when the world is so full of work to be done, when a little touch, a word, a little help, might stem the tide of disaster or clear the way to success?" Yet Patience, for all her pictures, is no listless figure, and her virtues are not those of acceptation only. Patience, while she knows best how to wait, is of all the virtues most active.
We are so apt to speak of patient wives and mothers, meaning those who bear meekly all the crosses and trials of a blessed but ofttimes troubled state. But the patient woman is not the one who bears silently the blows and screams of an ill-regulated child, nor the neglects and cruelties of an indifferent husband. She who does so may seem to herself very sanctified; but the really sanctified, the truly saintlike, are not so much concerned with the blows they endure, with the bearing of all things meekly, as they are in remedying the evil, in seeing the good, and in steadfast belief that it must prevail. Patience with such as these is the patience of hope, of faith, of knowledge, of wisdom. It is the patience of belief — belief in that abiding omnipresent good that for a little has been overshadowed by the cloud of evil. The really patient mother is undisturbed by a fretful, troublesome child, about whom everybody else complains, not because she thinks it her cross to bear, but because she believes that the child's good nature will prevail.
