It is the rare person who, looking back over his life and seeing what he has done to it, hasn't sighed for a chance to redeem what he has cheaply used or carelessly ruined. If only somehow, somewhere, there was a way to live again the days we have darkened with our blind haste—the innumerable occasions when our indifference trod on all the pearls of God’s graciousness: the times when our pride, or our fear, or our meanness poured the acid of contempt over the fair countenance of another’s soul! If this grace were ours, how we would leap to the chance!
"To live spiritually is to find the treasure of God’s riches at its heart. It is to leap beyond the ramparts of this world and to see it from the inside with understanding. It is to be conscious of the eternal stream of creation in God; and to know that there is no satisfaction of human thirst outside of it. Sooner or later, the yes or no must be given. Man must have his treasure either here or there, he will serve mammon or God, either or, but never both."
But there is an even deeper yearning in this sigh of the soul to be born again. It is not that we futilely ask to be born at the beginning again, but rather that now being what we are, we are ill content to go on in the same way. The past is past, and we know it. It cannot be broken or re-made. There is no way back. And this is our burden!
This piece is an excerpt from Samuel Howard Miller, The Life of the Soul (Harper, 1951)
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