Job 14:1

It may be of great service to us, before we fall asleep, to remember this mournful fact, for it may lead us to hold loosely to earthly things. There is nothing very pleasant in the recollection that we are not above the shafts of adversity, but it may humble us and prevent our boasting, as the Psalmist did (described in our morning reading) when he said, “My mountain stands firm: I shall never be moved.”

This remembrance may keep us from taking too deep root in this soil, from which we are so soon to be transplanted into the heavenly garden. Let us remember the precarious hold we have on our temporal mercies. If we would remember that all the trees of earth are marked for the woodsman’s axe, we should not be so ready to build our nests in them.

We should love, but we should love with the love that expects death and anticipates separations. Our dear relations are only loaned to us, and the hour when we must return them to the Lender’s hand may be even at the door. The same is certainly true of our worldly goods.

Do not riches take to themselves wings and fly away? Our health is equally precarious. Frail flowers of the field, we must not expect to bloom forever. There is a time appointed for weakness and sickness, when we will have to glorify God by suffering, and not by earnest activity.

There is no single point in which we can hope to escape from the sharp arrows of affliction; out of our few days, not one is secure from sorrow. Human life is a cask full of bitter wine; whoever looks for joy in it had better seek for honey in an ocean of brine.

Beloved reader, do not set your affections on things of earth, but seek those things that are above, for here the moth devours and the thief breaks through, but there all joys are perpetual and eternal. The path of trouble is the way home. Lord, make this thought a pillow for many a weary head!