LITTLE THINGS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXVI, Issue 79, 14 March 1936, Page 8

LITTLE THINGS

The little things are really the big things of life, the things whieh truly make for happiness and contentment — food, shelter, health, love, and work. In these days of many so-called pleasures, of many devices and gadgets which are sometimes looked upon as necessities, but whieh are not and never can be or need be, we are apt to grow discontented unless we have many of the extras of life. Yet have you not often seen that it is those people who are content with little, and who take

pleasure in simple things, who find the best and most lasting happiness! Our blessed Lord was a poor man. He had never known luxury. Yet His is the model life. He it was Who showed the way to peace. The greatest gift He could leave with His disciples was His peace, “the peace of God which passeth understanding.” Why does it pass understanding! Bo cause by the world’s way of reckoning He chose not the way of peace, but of sorrow and tribulation and even death. The world does not seek peace; it seeks pleasure, pastime, forgetfulness, and it seeks these things in excitement and noise and the doing and possessing of many things. Even our children are encouraged often to desire things to make them happy and contented, which tend rather to destroy these very things they are thought to compass. Leave a child to its own devices, and it will find its greatest enjoyment in the simplest things imaginable — flowers, sand, stones, anything to dig or build. I know a child who spends happy days in a sand-heap in the garden, and another who is fretful with a nursery chockfull of toys. Happiness is not dependent upon the number of our possessions, but upon the thankful heart which takes God’s gifts and is content