| Making the Most of Life |
Chapter 20 |
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There are those who receive help from friends in unnumbered ways, through years, help that brings to them great aid in life – promotion, advancement, improvement in character, widening of privileges and opportunities, tender kindness that warms, blesses, and inspires the heart, and enriches, refines, and ennobles the life – who yet seem never to recognize or appreciate the benefit and the good they receive. They appear to feel no obligation, no thankfulness. They make no return of love for all of love’s ministry. They even repay it with complaint, with criticism, with bitterness. We have all known years of continued favours forgotten, and their memory wiped out by one small failure to grant a new request for help. We have all known malignant hate to be the return for long periods of lavish kindness.
Ingratitude is robbery. It robs those to whom gratitude is due, for it is the withholding of that which is justly theirs. If you are kind to another, is he not your debtor? If you show another favours, does not he owe you thanks? True, you ask no return, for love does not work for wages. Only selfishness demands repayment for help given, and is embittered by ingratitude. The Christly spirit continues to give and bless, pouring out its love in unstinted measure, though no act or word or look tells of gratitude.
“If thy true service mounted, in its aim,
No higher than the praise that men bestow
On noble sacrifice, there might be shame
That thou hast missed it so.
“But no for selfish gain or low reward,
Didst thou so labour under shade and sun;
But with the conscious sense that for thy Lord
This weary work was done.
“He asked no thanks, no recognition nigh,
No tender acceptation of his grace,
No pitying tear from one responsive eye,
No answering human face.
“To do God’s will–that was enough for Christ.
‘Mid griefs that make all agonies look dim.
It shall for thee suffice–it hath sufficed,
As it sufficed for him.”
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