Let the year unfold with faith – Sunday, January 05, 1958
Always it is sobering to begin a new cycle of days, a new cycle of seasons. Always we wonder what undisclosed events are in the offing: Who of us will be here a year hence, and who will leave this life, who will see sorrow and who will see success always we wish we could see farther into the future, and always we suppose that if we knew more, we would do much better than we do. But there are some things we do now know that we don’t rush to do.
We don’t always live our lives as if we knew some things we now know. Often, we ignore what we know. This is a subject which at another time we should like more fully to consider. But right now, with what is left of this moment or two of time, we should like to cite some profound and searching sentences from Emerson, which suggest that the Lord God will tell us what we need to know, will continue to reveal truth to us, or let us discover it for ourselves, as we are ready to receive it.
“God screens us evermore from premature ideas,” he said.’ “Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened, then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not, is like a dream.”1 In another of his essays, Emerson offered this observation: “The popular notion of a revelation is, that it is a telling of fortunes . . . to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do, and who shall be their company, . . . But we must pick no locks.
We must check this low curiosity… It is not in an arbitrary ‘decree of God,’ but in the nature of man that a veil shuts down on the facts of tomorrow; for the soul will not have us read any other but that of cause and effect . . .”2 In short, as we sum up these sentences, it seems that we receive and understand and see about what we are ready and able and willing to receive and understand and see.
And as we are prepared for it, we shall not receive less of truth, less of understanding, than we are entitled to. As we live the law, as we keep the commandments, as we use the hours and opportunities that are ours, as we acknowledge by our earnest actions what we do now know then a loving, understanding Father will add all else we need to know.
All things well and wisely used will be added unto, and all things earned will be ours. And with this quiet certainty of assurance, we can let the year unfold with faith.
1Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spiritual Laws.
2Ibid; The Over-Soul.
January 05, 1958
Broadcast Number 1,481