A meditation from Rev. Tom Keyte

A recent newspaper snippet tells of a man in Italy
who was digging a hole to bury a dead dog when he unearthed a
priceless statue of Venus.

That sort of thing happens every now and then in
this strange life of ours. The big surprises tend to come upon
us when we are getting on with life’s ordinary tasks.

There is a well-known Bible story about a young man
who went out one morning to search for his father’s straying cattle,
and when he arrived home in the evening the whole course of his
life had dramatically changed; he had been anointed to the first
king of Israel! On the way Gop’s prophet had met him and seen
in him God’s choice. The point is that nothing could have been
farther from his thoughts. He was simply doing his ordinary humdrum
job, and the splendidly unexpected burst upon him. If he had been
less conscientious, and given up the search sooner, he would have
missed the thrilling experience of that great moment.

A pretty important truth about life lies there somewhere:
that the most worthwhile things in life don’t come to us when
we are directly seeking for them, but rather as a sort of by-product
of something else altogether. The sooner we come to terms with
that fact the better for our understanding of the ways of God.

Trying hard to be happy

Happiness is a ready example of that. No doubt happiness
does depend to some extent on conditions which we can at least
partly control, such as health, the culture of the mind, and so
on. But we have not begun to think about the matter if we leave
it there. Nobody ever found real happiness by making it their
objective in life. That search shows about the lowest winning
average of any human quest. Some of the unhappiest people I know
are those who are trying hardest to be happy. Happiness comes
most often when we are seeking something else altogether, something
that concerns the welfare of other people, for example. If you
think over people you know, you will find that this is so.

The same applies to, say, the search for security,
the desire for freedom, and all sorts of other matters on which
we set our hearts.

It is all rather like that scene in `Alice Through
the Looking-Glass’ (the sequel to `Alice in Wonderland’), where
Alice has climbed through the drawing-room window into the Looking-Glass
House. There she finds everything the wrong way round. She goes
out into the garden and sees a little hill in the distance with
a path leading to it. She thinks she would like to go there, but
every time she turns her back on the house and starts walking
towards the hill the path gives a queer twist and she finds herself
walking back into the house again. She tries several times, with
the same result. It is quite exasperating the way that house keeps
getting in the way and the hill remains as far off as ever.

At last, in desperation, she tries a plan of walking
in the opposite direction, and it works, for this, of course,
is Looking-Glass Land, and that is what you would expect to happen
there. But the extraordinary thing is that it is very much the
sort of feeling many people have about real life.

It’s what Jesus meant by what Walter Murdoch called
the profoundest single sentence ever uttered since human speech
began: `If you would save your life you shall lose it, and if
you are willing to lose your life for my sake you shall find it.’