When a Mouse Falls Into a Meal Sack…

There is an old Dutch proverb that reads, “When a mouse falls into a meal sack, he thinks he is the miller himself.”which suggests something of the sincere humility that all of us should feel in great degree.

We admire great art and the artist but the painting at best only simulates something seen in the handiwork of God. It may be so well done that is seems to have the breath of life, but it doesn’t have the breath of life. Statuary in clay, in stone, in bronze, delineating beauty of form and face, of muscle and movement, is a thing of beauty only because it stimulates and suggests something seen in the work of Him who created us all. At its most beautiful best it lacks the very breath of life.

Let’s look a moment in another direction: We are deeply grateful for the discoveries men have made in medicine: for so-called miracle drugs, for skillful diagnosis, and for delicate surgery, but the most skilled of men can only aid the physical functions. He can’t create them. He can assist nature, but he can’t determine the ultimate outcome. He and all of us must watch and wait when the issues of life and death are in the balance.

The scientist in every field discovers a few laws and uses them to remarkable and miraculous ends, but he doesn’t make the laws; he doesn’t create the processes; he doesn’t make a lifeless thing a living thing. He uses; he observes; he waits; and he wonders.

Sometimes we think great thoughts, new and thrilling and wonderful to us, and then later we find that they have been thought and recorded by many minds, many times, in many places thoughts that suggest a surpassing Source of truth and of inspiration, of laws and of learning and failure to recognize the source of all such is an unhappy error.

Because we paint a picture, because we mold a metal, because we carve stone, because we “make” and administer a medicine, because we learn laws, because we can in a measure change the form of things and control some physical functions, does not mean that we are the makers of the things we use or of the laws we learn or of the life we live. And as we see so much of what is made, and lest we think too little of the Maker, we may well remember a homely and humbling proverb: “When a mouse falls into a meal sack, he thinks he is the miller himself.”