Reconciliation with Life – Sunday, December 15, 1946
Attitudes toward life change with age and experience. As children there may have been times when we confidently believed that the world was ours, that we were the center of the universe, that our convenience and desires were all determining factors. But with increasing years and the discipline of experience we come to learn that life is a schooling—and not a holiday. We come to learn also that some of the required courses are not to our liking, and that some of the lessons are difficult to take. And some of us make the discipline seem harder than it needs to be. In the bitterness of disappointment, or in the wake of some unwanted experience, we sometimes rebel against life, and fight it all the way, resisting everything that is, and murmuring against every circumstance, with feelings of resentment because of lessons that we think are too severe, and because of burdens that we feel are too heavy to be borne. And yet we do find ourselves somehow bearing them as they come, and learning how, to get along with our own troubles.
Often quoted is the old and well-worn story of the man who came to the place where all men bring their burdens, in the hope of exchanging his load for that of someone else. But after gazing upon the troubles of others, he was willing to take up his own again. As the years increase upon our heads, we come to learn that all men have their full share of troubles, and that, by comparison, some of our own seem much less heavy. And when all the facts are known, it is highly probable that many whom we may once have envied, and many whom we may once have thought were trouble-free, are carrying around in their lives and in their hearts many things that we wouldn’t wish to take on, not even if, in doing so, we could lay down our own load.
We do somehow learn to live with our own troubles. But it could well be that we might find it exceedingly difficult to learn to live with someone else’s. And wisdom would suggest that we become reconciled to what we cannot change.
‘The Spoken Word,” heard over Radio Station K S L and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System, from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, December 15, 1946, 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon, EST. Copyright 1946.
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December 15, 1946
Broadcast Number 0,904