The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
I know a lad, and everything seems to happen to him. He’s that kind of fellow. One day he goes out and comes back with the pocket of his trousers ripped. ‘Oh’, he says, ‘It wasn’t all my fault. There was some old thing sticking out of the wall.’ Then he goes to work in the fields and he comes home with a hole in his trousers where no self-respecting lad should have one. And he says, ‘Well, it wasn’t my fault. It was a pitch fork.’
Reminds me of the story of the man who was ruefully looking at his car lying bashed up in the hedge. A passerby stopped to offer help. ‘You know,’ said the man. ‘This is the seventh car I’ve had and they all seem to be accident prone.’
Sometimes the poor hubby gets the blame when he shouldn’t. You married men know the remark that’s made when there’s a minor calamity in the kitchen. ‘If you hadn’t been fooling that wouldn’t have happened.’ Well, there it is. We all want to shove the blame on to somebody else and if we can’t find anybody handy we just call it fate. We never want to imagine that we ourselves had any part in the misfortunes that happen to us. Sometimes when we can’t find anyone or anything else we blame God.
I was talking to some folk the other day who were going through a tough enough time. I told them that they had had a bad time. ‘Oh, we’ll get through all right,’ was the answer. ‘There’s no use in whining.’ They didn’t blame anybody, not even themselves. With a quiet trust they faced life with the faith that asks no questions.
It’s an old story, the one of passing the blame on to somebody else. You get it in Genesis. When Adam was questioned by God about his wrong doing, he said, ‘It was the woman’s fault.’ And Eve, in her turn said, ‘It was the serpent’s fault.’
Many a lad who gets caught up in some kind of trouble says; ‘Oh well, I couldn’t help it.’ A man before the court once pleaded as an excuse for his offense, ‘An irresistible impulse.’ The Magistrate told him that an irresistible impulse was just an impulse not controlled. The fact is that when we trust God we are master of our circumstances. It is quite true that we are not responsible for the difficulties in our surroundings. We are responsible for our attitude. We don’t have to break under the strain of life. We don’t have to give way when we are faced with evil.
There is a very good word in the New Testament: ‘No temptation has waylaid you that is beyond man’s power; trust God, He will never let you be tempted beyond what you can stand, but when temptation comes he will provide the way out of it, so that you can bear up under it.’
Yes, I know! Sometimes it’s easier to give way and to drift with the stream. It takes courage and faith to go against the stream.
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