Reaching Perfection

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Reaching Perfection

"Perfect through suffering" (Heb. 2:10).

Steel

is iron plus fire. Soil is rock, plus heat, or glacier crushing. Linen

is flax plus the bath that cleans, the comb that separates, and the

flail that pounds, and the shuttle that weaves. Human character must

have a plus attached to it. The world does not forget great characters.

But great characters are not made of luxuries, they are made by

suffering.

I heard of a mother who brought into her home as a

companion to her own son, a crippled boy who was also a hunchback. She

had warned her boy to be very careful in his relations to him, and not

to touch the sensitive part of his life but go right on playing with

him as if he were an ordinary boy. She listened to her son as they were

playing; and after a few minutes he said to his companion: "Do you know

what you have got on your back?" The little hunchback was embarrassed,

and he hesitated a moment. The boy said: "It is the box in which your

wings are; and some day God is going to cut it open, and then you will

fly away and be an angel."

Some day, God is going to reveal the

fact to every Christian, that the very principles they now rebel

against, have been the instruments which He used in perfecting their

characters and molding them into perfection, polished stones for His

great building yonder.

--Cortland Myers