Let the Years Unfold With Faith

Often we wonder what unseen events are in the offing: Who of us will be here after a year from now? Who will leave this life; who will see sorrow and who will see success? How often we wish we could see further into the future, and how often we think that if we knew more we would do much better than we do. But there are some things we do now know that we do not do. Often we ignore what we know. There are some searching sentences from Emerson which suggest that the Lord God will tell us what we need to know, will continue to reveal truth to us, or let us discover it for ourselves, as we are ready to receive it. “God screens us evermore from premature ideas,” he said. Often “we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened, then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not, is like a dream.” In another of his essays, Emerson offered this observation: “The popular notion of a revelation is, that it is a telling of fortunes…to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do, and who shall be their company…But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity….It is not in an arbitrary ‘decree of God,’ but in the nature of man that a veil shuts down on the facts of tomorrow; for the soul will not have us read any other but that of cause and effect.” In short, it seems that we receive and understand and see about what we are ready and able and willing to receive and understand and see. And, as we are prepared for it, we shall receive all the truth, all the understanding, than we are entitled to. As we live the law, keep the commandments and use the hours and opportunities that are ours, as we use in our daily lives what we do now know, then a loving, understanding Father will add all else that we need to know. And with this quiet certainty of assurance we can let the year unfold with faith.