Beyond Tomorrow – Sunday, January 03, 1943
The awareness that another year has been measured out to us is always a sobering experience. But this year, with time pressing for decisions that will intimately affect the lives of all of us, we face the uncompromising reality of a new year with intense effort and prayerful waiting and watching, and always with the question in mind: What kind of world shall we live in tomorrow? On broad lines there are some who feel that they know, in accordance with the revealed purposes of the Almighty, what kind of world we shall live in ultimately, but ultimately is not tomorrow; and among those truly endowed with wisdom, perhaps there are none who would care to answer the question in detail—but of this we may be sure, somewhere along the line, whether it be tomorrow or beyond tomorrow, we shall pay a price for all our mistakes, for all our indifference, for all misdirected action.
Some of these penalties do not wait for tomorrow. For some of them we are paying today. Collectively, we have been charging against futures which we have hoped would not arrive, but which have and do and will arrive. Always it should be remembered, and certainly at the New Year it must be remembered, that whenever a charge is made against a future time, inevitably there follows a day of reckoning.
In all history men have rarely taken the necessary steps toward facing this reality until such steps could no longer be avoided. We tolerate things until they become intolerable. We postpone the inevitable until further postponement is impossible. There is something about us that makes us seem to prefer taking our medicine in big and violent doses, rather than to take the Great Physician’s prescription from day to day.
Our belief may have been otherwise, but our practice has too often been one of undergoing periodic illness and submitting to drastic remedy rather than one of maintaining our well-being by sane and sound living. But, on the credit side, as the New Year faces us, we have the comforting assurance that life is a process and not an ultimate end—a journey and not a destination. It is the making of an ideal—not the ideal itself. If life were bounded by birth and death, the futility and injustice of some daily happenings would never find explanation. But the larger view of which we have assurance, which reaches beyond our present vision, will sometime clear up things not now understood.
Let today hold what it will, there are greater things beyond today, in the providence of the Lord, our God. Of such is the promise of all the new years to come.
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Jan. 3, 1943, over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1943.
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January 03, 1943
Broadcast Number 0,698