The Secret of the
Singing Heart

CHAPTER XIV

IF YOU CAN'T HELP IT

  We should always like to have the ability to make things go as we wish them to go in this life. We should always like to accomplish everything we attempt. We desire all our plans to work out as we plan them. We should like to avoid all disappointments, all failures, all wrecking of our hopes and plans. Unfortunately, or perhaps sometimes fortunately, we cannot always accomplish what we desire. There are none of us but who can look back upon mistakes, failures, and other things in the past that bring us regret. I suppose all of us would like to change many things in our lives. We should like to have the opportunity of trying again where we failed.

  Perhaps we realize that failure was our own fault. Perhaps we look back upon errors, indiscretions, blunders, etc., that humiliate and trouble us. We live under the shadow of them. Some of us are saying to ourselves, "Oh, if I had not done it. Oh, if I had done differently." Others are saying, "I failed. What is the use to try again?"

  There are others who look back upon dark things in their lives that have come upon them seemingly through no fault of their own. They cannot get away from the influence of these things, or at least they do not do so. A blighting influence from the past permeates and [88] darkens the present. What shall we do with those things of the past, We cannot live over those days that are gore. We cannot have another chance in the things wherein we failed. We cannot turn the clock of time back; to yesterday. We are here in today. Those things are back in yesterday. We are eternally separated from them so far as having power to change them is concerned. We cannot help the past.

  There is but one thing left for us, that is—make the best of the present. We cannot make the best of the present if we bring into it things of the past that be me present hindrances. Some wrongs of the past may be righted. Some things that have been done may be undone. If so, instead of letting the shadow of these things rest upon our lives and their weight upon our consciences we should make haste to do all that can  be done to right them. There are people who should make things right that they have done that have wronged people. I shall not tell you to pass these by, to forget them. Instead I must say it is your duty to do everything possible to make right any wrongs of the past.

  I am talking in this chapter of things we cannot help, not of things we can help or of damage we can repair. There can be no excuse for our not doing what we can do to repair errors of the past. At the same time there are many things that cannot be improved by anything we may do. No effort of ours can make them better. We may regret the past ever so much. We may be humiliated by it. It may be a constant trouble, goading us all the time. What shall we do about such things? I [89] find in my note book a little verse, the origin of which I do not know:

"For every evil under the sun
There is a remedy or there is none;
If there is one try to find it,
If there is none never mind it."

  This is excellent advice. If there is a remedy for the past try earnestly to find it, but what cannot be remedied should be left to the past. Shakespeare says, "What's gone, and what's past help should be past grief." We should shut the door of the past lest the chilling breezes that blow through cause us to be unable to make proper use of the present. Paul had things in his life that troubled him. Mention is made here and there in his writings of that much regretted past. The blood of God's saints was upon his garments. He remembered the bitterness and hatred he had put into the pitiless persecution that he had visited upon the Christians. He remembered his part in the death of Stephen. He remembered how he had witnessed against many, had thrown many into prison, had brought many to death. He could not change the past. There was but one thing he could do. He resolved to do what was possible to do. He said, "One thing I do. Forgetting those things that are behind I press forward."

  Ah, yes, forgetting the past. We should like to forget things. We cannot forget them. Alas! neither could Paul forget in the sense of banishing them from his memory. He could forget them, however, in a very practical sense, and this he did. He did not let them hinder him living a life of freedom and activity, of love and sacrifice, of wholehearted devotion to the Christ he [90] had hated. He threw all his energies into today. He did not let vain regret hinder him. Perhaps those regrets, deep and poignant as they were, often pressed in upon him, lint he pushed them aside and threw himself anew into the work he was doing, perhaps even more zealously than he would have done or could have done had he not been spurred on by these regrets.

  Some are chained to the past by griefs and sorrows. Some live in the past with loved ones who have gone to a brighter clime. Some homes are kept darkened and th, voice of music is hushed. A dead hand lies upon the heart and upon the home. Such a sorrow can be a blight the life. What shall we do? Shall we tear affection fom our hearts? Shall we put from us thoughts of the happy past? No, we need not do this, but we must not walk with our sorrow and commune with it until it becomes the greatest fact in our lives.

  We must resolutely overcome blighting sorrow. We must live in today. There may be a sort of grim pleasure in living in a cemetery. Such a life is but a living death. Our loved ones would not wish us thus to sorrow for them. They would desire us to enter into the activities of today. They would be remembered but not with a sorrow so deep and absorbing that it shuts out any of the happiness that might come to us today or prevents us from filling the useful place we might fill.

  There are others who are not so troubled about the things of yesterday as they are about the things of today. There are people who have within themselves things that are constantly getting them into trouble. They are of an unfortunate temperament or they have.[91]