| The Ministry of Comfort |
Chapter 15 |
Page 6 |
An interesting story is told of a good woman who opened a home for children for whom no other one seemed to care. Among those received into her home was a boy of three years whose condition was pitiable indeed. His skin was blotched and his disposition was fretful and unhappy. Try as she would the woman could not love him. Something in him repelled her. She was outwardly kind to him, but it was always an effort to show him any tenderness.
One day she sat on the veranda of her house with this boy on her knee. She dropped asleep and dreamed that she saw herself in the child’s place, the Master bending over her. She heard Him say, “If I can bear with you, who are so full of fault and sin, can you not, for My sake, love this poor, innocent child, who is suffering, not for his own sin, but through the sin of his parents?”
The woman awoke with a sudden start and looked into the face of the boy. Penitent because of her past unkind feeling, and with a new compassion for him in her heart, she bent down and kissed him as tenderly as ever she had kissed babe of her own. The boy gave her a smile so sweet that she had never seen one like it before. Form that moment a change came over him. The new affection in the woman’s heart transformed his peevish, fretful disposition into gentleness. She loved him now, and her serving was glad hearted and Christ like, no more perfunctory.
There is no other secret of the best and truest serving. We must love those we would help. Service without love counts for nothing. We can love even the unloveliest when we learn to see in them possibilities of divine beauty. But only the love of Christ in us will prepare us for such serving.
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