When a Mouse Falls Into a Meal Sack…

There is an old Dutch proverb that says “When a mouse falls into a meal sack, he thinks he is the miller himself.” This suggests something of the sincere humility that all of us have need of. We admire great art and the artist – but the painting at best only imitates. It may be so well done that it seems to have the breath of life, but it doesn’t have the movement, is a thing of beauty only because it simulates and suggests the work of Him who created us all. At its most beautiful best it lacks the breath of life. Let’s look a moment in another direction: for skillful diagnosis, for remedies, 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 control 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 in remarkable manner, but he doesn’t make the laws; 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 before – by many minds, many times, in many places – thoughts that suggest a common Source – and failure to recognize the Source is an unhappy error. Because we paint a picture, 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.