A Day at a Time

This book
written in wartime
to minister comfort
and if it may be to reinforce hope
and faith
is dedicated
by permission
to
Sir John R. Jellicoe
G.C.B., K.C.V.O.
Admiral of the Grand Fleet

“There are nettles everywhere,
But smooth green grasses are more common still;
The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud.”

E. B. Browning

If any one of us knows a word of hope or has picked up a message of comfort anywhere, it is his plain duty to share it, these days. We owe it to each other to cherish as exceeding precious, and to pass on to others, every brave and helpful word or thought we come across.

Well, here is a splendid one for us all, and especially for those who have most at stake in this great conflict, and are looking anxiously ahead and fearing what the weeks may have in store—“As thy days, so shall thy strength be.” It is a great and glorious promise. And just a couple of verses further on, it is caught up and included in one greater still—“The eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Fathers and mothers, with a boy, or more than one, perhaps, away on active service for King and country, this promise is for you, to take to your heart and hide there, like some precious secret between you and God—As thy days, so shall thy strength be.

Notice carefully, however, how the promise runs. Not, mark you, as your life is, not as your years are, not even as your weeks are, but as your days, so shall your strength be. For each day as it comes, God’s promise is that strength will be given you, but just for a day at a time. The way to live under any circumstances, but especially in these hard weeks, is just a day at a time. Leave tomorrow with God, my brother, until it comes. That is what the Word of God lays upon you as a duty. Live this day at your best and bravest, trusting that God’s help will not fail you. And for the duties and trials of tomorrow, however hard and heavy, believe that strength for that day also will be given you, when it comes.

You cannot have failed to observe what an important place this way of living had in the teaching of Jesus Christ. He was always trying to get men to trust the coming days to God, and to live fully worthily and nobly today. He was dead against the practice of adding to the burdens of today fears and forebodings for tomorrow. It is in love to us, in His desire to save us unnecessary pain, that He bids us remember that “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

In one of R. D. Blackmore’s fine open-air stories, there is a character who talks at length about horses. After comparing good ones and bad ones in their behaviour the first time they breast a hill with a load behind them, he sums the matter up thus: “Howsoever good a horse be, he longeth to see over the top of the hill before he be halfway up it.” The man who is listening to him confesses that he has often felt that way himself! And I do not know that there are many of us who can claim to be guiltless in this respect. Yet it is perfectly plain that the men and women who are living the bravest and most successful lives around us, and are proving towers of strength to others, are those who have learned the art of living just a day at a time, and of depending upon God for strength for that day in the simplest and most trustful fashion.

Why, my brothers, if God our Father had meant us to carry on our backs the fears and anxieties of the coming days, He would surely have told us more about them! If we were meant to bear today what next week holds, surely we should have been permitted to see into next week. But we cannot. We cannot see a single second ahead. God gives us Now, and Tomorrow He keeps to Himself. Is there anything wiser or better we can do with our tomorrows than just to leave them quietly and trustfully with Him?

The habit of living ahead, as so many of us do, prevents us from getting the full taste and flavour of the happiness and blessing that are ours today. I defy any man to be adequately grateful for this day’s sunshine if he is worrying all the time about the chance of a bad day tomorrow. Mark Rutherford, merciless self-critic as he was, takes himself severely to task for this habit in his Autobiography. “I learned, alas! when it was almost too late,” he says, “to live in each moment as it passed over my head, believing that the sun as it is now rising, is as good as it ever will be.” Yes, in great things as well as in little things, that is true. If we are to live our lives at the full, and anywhere on the Christian level, the only way is to live one day at a time.

Our forefathers in the pulpit were fond of reminding their hearers to live each day as if it were their last. And in solemn truth, without being in the least morbid, that is the way to live. If a man knew that after today, he would not smell the sea again, how fully and gratefully would he fill his lungs with its ozone today! If he knew he were not to enter God’s House again, how earnestly and sincerely and reverently he would join in its worship today! Yes, but the point is, why should his hope, that he has other days to come, prevent him taking out of this day all that he possibly can? Why should this day be any less prized, because others in all probability will follow it?

But the great value of this word is the comfort of it to those who are anxious and fear the coming days. And which of us is not in that category? I do not suppose there is one of my readers upon whom, somehow or other, the war has not levied its tax. Nearly everyone has somebody belonging to him or her who is in this gigantic struggle, and whose welfare is a matter of real concern. And, closer still, there are fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, whose very dearest are “in it” or are getting ready to do their share. They have joined, and we are proud that they have joined, for this is a cause that ennobles every mother’s son who fights for it. But who shall say what the mother’s thoughts are, these days? How proud, and justly proud, the father is that his boy has played the man, and offered himself to his King and for his country! But only God, who made the father—and the mother—heart, knows what the surrender costs. And only God knows how eagerly and anxiously they look ahead to try to see what the future may hold.

And, knowing that, He sends His comfort to you, fathers and mothers. The comfort of His promise—As thy days, so shall thy strength be. Just a day at a time, my friend! Do not take fears for next month on your shoulders now. You will get strength given you for today, certain and sure, and when next month comes, the strength and comfort for that day will come too, as certain and as sure. Be not overanxious about the morrow. Leave your tomorrow, and your soldier-son, in God’s hands. You can do nothing more at the best, and this is the best. But it is such a mistake to do anything less. Leave all your tomorrows with God—it is what He wants you to do—and humbly and gratefully take from His hands His gift of Today, and the strength that comes with it. If that be not enough—and it is not enough for God has said more—when that is not enough, still your heart a moment, and listen! And you will hear, beneath that promise for today, like the grand deep tones of an organ, the magnificent diapason of the Father’s constant love and mindfulness—“The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” And surely that is enough!

“So for Tomorrow and its needs
I do not pray,
But keep me, guide me, help me, Lord,
Just for Today.”

The prophet Ezekiel once had an extraordinary vision of God. He tries to tell us about it, but his description seems to be a meaningless jumble of cherubim, and wheels—wheels within wheels, complex, wonderful, unresting. Behind all, he saw the Glory of God. And again and again he tells us that “the Spirit of Life was in the wheels.”

Now that at least is intelligible, and it is a good thing for us to think about. The Spirit of God is in the wheels.

I want to suggest to you that He is in the wheels of industry. We have no hesitation in saying that God gives the farmer his harvest, and we actually thank Him for it in His temple. A shepherd with a lamb in his arms is for a pastoral people like the Jews the very image of the Saviour God. But men who dwell in towns, and work in mills and factories and yards and railways, or who control or manage such places, have little to do with either corn or sheep. Is it not worth while to remind them that God is also in the wheels? Do you remember how Kipling’s old chief engineer Macandrew believed that his twin monsters, driving the liner onward on her way, sang their hourly hymn of praise to God? And why not? From all the wheels of industry and man’s inventiveness, goes there not up to Him a praise as real as the song of His little birds?

Where two or three gather together on Lord’s days, God is truly and graciously present. But I want you to remember that out in the noisy moving world of industry and business, God is present also, guiding, controlling and bringing His long, long plans to pass. It is by His decree that all the countless wheels of traffic and production turn and spin, for He needs them all, and has brought them into being by the hands of men, and they are His, as the Church is His. I would not have you, as Christian men, look upon your weekday world with its mechanism and its traffic, that world of yours that goes so literally upon wheels, as a province of life very far remote from the presence of God. I would remind you rather that God’s spirit is in those wheels, that they move at His bidding, and that they are working out His purposes upon the earth.

I would suggest, further, that God is in those wheels whose turning brings us Change. If you will allow the figure, I would say that God is in the wheels of Change and time.

As we grow older, we resent more and more the constant alteration of the surroundings of life. It saddens us that there should be such a continual moving on. But perhaps it is in the realm of doctrine and practice that changes hurt and perplex us most. Godly old customs die out. The face of truth seems to alter. Old notes in religion disappear and new ones take their place, and we are sorely tempted to ask if it be possible that the children can know God better or serve His Christ more truly than their fathers. Ah yes, from forty years and upwards, men are very apt to have a quarrel with change. They resent it, and would spike Time’s wheels if they could.

Forgetting that the Spirit of God is in those very wheels. Change is God’s method and His blessing. The Bible does not envy the man who has no changes. It is afraid for him, afraid that for want of them, he may settle on his lees, and forget the fear of God.

Of course, no one will defend every new fashion, or assert that everything recent is an improvement on what went before. But I, for one, do believe that generation after generation men are moving up, being shepherded up, the long slope of history nearer to God. I believe that God’s promise is that He will do better for us than at the beginnings, and I believe He is keeping His promise. I must believe that the history of this world which man rough hews, is—spite of all the wars—being shaped by God Himself, or else there is no God at all. And so I would say to those who distrust the continual changes of life, and would fain stop the wheels that turn on and on and never halt, “Fear not! Be of good courage! For aback of all change is God our Father, and it is His Spirit that is working in the wheels.”

Again, I would suggest to you that God is in the wheels that shape your own lot and mine. The wheels of Chance, they are sometimes called, the mere whirligig of destiny, as if the world were some blind irresponsible machine grinding on in the dark, and heeding not which or how many lives were broken in its teeth.

And I grant you that there be times when that idea seems feasible. For life is full of mysterious happenings, and chance sometimes seems the most probable explanation. The tragedy of Job is always being played somewhere. There are men who up to a certain point in life have known nothing but good fortune, and after that, nothing but disappointment and disaster. Out of a blue sky the bolt may fall on anyone; while from clouds lowering and heavy, it is waited for, expected and dreaded—and never comes! The merest knife-edge of circumstance sometimes affects results out of all proportion to its importance. “A grain of sand in a man’s flesh” as Pascal remarks, “has changed the course of Empires.” Yes, I grant you, there be times when the blind chance theory does suggest itself.

But by an overwhelming majority the instinct of man is against it. And best of all, Jesus Christ, our supreme authority, has pledged Himself in His life and death, that the Ruler and Disposer of all events is Eternal Love. We have learned from Jesus to say and to trust “Our Father who art in Heaven.” We know and believe that whatever is to come falls not by chance, but is sent and permitted by the Love of God, who makes no mistakes. Taught and inspired by Jesus, many thousands of men and women have committed themselves and all their interests—home, health, happiness, reputation, loved ones—to the keeping of God the Father, and known by the peace that came to them, that it was a real transaction.

Soulless wheels of destiny! say some. The blind mechanism of law! Ah, no, Jesus is the refutation of that. Law there is, and mechanism there must be. But neither blind nor soulless. For, above all, is the Father Love of God, and it is His spirit that is guiding and governing the wheels.

Wheels of Industry, Wheels of Change, Wheels of Destiny. And God’s Spirit in them all!