The Pulpit Speaks: June 21, 1958

An article written by my father, the Rev. C. Thomas Paige, as it appeared in the Tri-State Defender on the date shown.

Whate’er thou art, where’er thy footsteps stray,
Heed these wise words: This, too, shall pass away.
Oh, jewel sentence from the mine of truth!
What riches it contains for age or youth.
No stately epic measured and sublime,
So comforts, or so counsels for all time
As these words. Go write them on thy heart
And make them of your daily life a part.
Art thou in misery, brother? Then I pray
Be comforted! Thy grief shall pass away.
Art thou elated? Ah, be not too gay;
Temper thy joy; this too shall pass away.
Fame, glory, place and power,
They are but baubles of the hour.
Thus be not o’er proud,
Not yet cast down; judge thou aright;
When skies are clear, expect the cloud
In darkness, wait the coming light;
Whatever be thy fate today,
Remember, even this shall pass away!

~Author unknown

This poem expresses a sentiment very dear to me. Day by day, I come in contact with people who apparently are enjoying life at its fullest, or at least think they are. They are blessed with good health, a reasonable amount of money, a few friends, and many other things which this world has allowed them to have.

They walk about with the air of one of the hit tunes of some years ago, “I Got the World on a String, Sitting on a Rainbow,” living, if you please, in a fool’s paradise, thinking that nothing can happen to them.

As I look at this teeming number among us, I stop and ask myself, “What is security?” To them, they have the utmost security. But oh how many of us have been awakened to find out that, in the batting of an eye, all that we have can be taken from us and in a few moments, we can be just as poor as we were when we first started out in this world.

Those of us who read our Bibles have run across a man in the Old Testament known as Job. He was the richest man in the East. He looked up one day and one of his servants told home that he had lost all of his cattle. Before this one would get through telling him of the loss, another came and told him of another catastrophe. Finally, his wife told him to curse God and die. This was not a series of things that happened over a period of months or years, but things that happened in the matter of a few moments. It was not a long time before Job’s joys were turned to sorrow, his wealth to poverty, his happy family life to strife and turmoil, and his high social and economic positions to a place of mourning.

Let us accept Job as a type for us. What happened to Hob can happen to any of us, here and now. There are joys and riches that can be ours; there are sources of happiness that can not or will not be taken from us.

I was looking in a paper a few days ago. A woman who had been teaching for nearly forty years looked back over the years and said:

I have not made much money. I haven’t had an opportunity to live the kind of life that many of my friends have enjoyed but when I look back over the years and see the number of lives that I have been instrumental in molding and the grateful hearts that come back to me and thank me for what I have done for them, life has been most rewarding!

I wonder if this type of spirit was not the kind of spirit that Jesus had in mind when He admonished us to store up for ourselves those things that moths and rust can’t destroy and thieves not take away.

This unknown author was like many of us. He had come to the place that he knew changes were constantly taking place. Your friends today will be your enemies of tomorrow. Your fine home today can be a pile of ashes tomorrow. Your bank account can be melted into paying doctors’ bills, court fines, lawyer’s fees and the like tomorrow. Whatever we have today, we can not say that it is ours. We are only custodians of certain things. God loans them to us – our smiles, our personalities, our abilities, our money, our homes, and our automobiles – for the glorification of His cause. As long as we use them for His glorification, we justify ourselves in having them. When they become tools in our hands for personal glorification, then we will awake one day to find them gone.

Yes, whatever our lot today – darkness, despair, loneliness, heartaches, joy, happiness, security – they shall pass away and tomorrow we may find ourselves in just the reverse position unless we dedicate all that we have to God.

View the entire archive of “The Pulpit Speaks” here.