The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1914-02-03
TN OUR TEENS AND early TWEEN.

TN OUR TEENS AND early TWEEN
ties we all feel quite competent
= to advise the Deity. We are sure
-shoutingly sure-that If we had
brought order out of chaos it would
have been a more orderly order, and
we should have brought it farther
out! We should have made the grass
greener-or maybe pink; roses thotI-
less, Wall Street pious, bees sting
less, poverty pleasant; politicians pure
in heart. the road to geometry royal,
more seats in street cars, more ice
in summer and less in winter. We
should have paved the road to heaven
with good intentions and stretched
barbed wire across the downslide.
In our youth we wonder with spec
ulative Impotence at the mistakes OF
the Deity. Such blatant defects!
Would you not think that He would
have arranged certain matters differ
emily? But perhaps gentle glow OF
conscious and beneficent power, lenl-
tive sense of being needed tool,
spreads from our minds egotistic
front portals to it's back wall of con-
ceit-perhaps the Lord remembered
that we should be coming along some
time and could help Him out!
Gustily aware of our Importance
to the eternal scheme of things, we
hasten blithely to make that scheme
less sorry. What the Lord has failed
to do we will do, gladly and easily!
Our egotism is titillated by the
thought that possibly we may give
the Lord some pointers on the proper
way to fix a world; so we fit the
handle of conceit to the broom OF IN
reference and try to sweep a mud
puddle from a neighbours life.
AS the twenties, like marbles, are
shot by the taw of time from the
chalked circle of the present into the
gutter of the past, our egotism
changes. Over it's sugary frostlng
hardens the glaze of encouragement
not that we are less sure of our
power to efface mudpuddles, but the
Lord has negligently failed to pro-
vide us with the proper broom. And
somehow we get the notion-though
we hope we are doing Him an IN
iustice-that He does not care very
much whether we repair His plumbers
or leave them alone
And our wonder at His mistakes is
no longer speculatively impatient. 1t
/ is harsh, bitter-even sardonic. Such
a world, Such a botched, muddy,
puddled, swampy, askew, foolish, mu-
fish, cracked, crooked, craven, power
ty-blighted, wealth-rotted, cannibal-
foundationed world! If we could not
have made better one we would not
have made any world at all!
| The vault from the twenties to the
thirties stretches the sinews of mind
and heart-and sometimes breaks our
broom-handles. We grow dubious of
our skill in sweeping. Several sup
posed puddles have turned out to be
foul wells, and we and our brooms
have merely succeeded in splashing
black slush over clean, dry adjacent
lives, without materially reducing the
mud. And we have come to acknowl-
edge that, though the Lord was rath-
err careless with puddles, He was al
so royalty generous with the pink
and blue and purple satin of flower
petals.
AS we grow older We regard with
more awe the Maker of petals. And
toward the forties we are glad-tired-
", tearfully, prayerfully glad-that
we do not have to stir the batter OF
love and lust and decency, and greed
and good will and passion, and mad
ness and peace and strife, which is
labeled the world. We are not sure
of our chemistry.
And after we have been nauseated
more than once by a manned soul
or a diseased heart, which a fool
hardy broom has whisked into public
view, it begins to glimmer through
our ignorance that maybe mud is not
always mud. Perhaps what we took
for Shiny slush, and wore out our
hone and Illusions trying to remove,
was fertilizer, poured there by the
Lord to enrich a life for future
growth.-Ida Evans.