HOW is it, “Rob,” asked one boy of another, “that you never get into scrapes like the rest of us?”
“Because I don’t talk back,” answered Robbie promptly. “When a boy says a hard thing to me, I just keep still.”
Many a man whose life has had in it a great deal of trouble and opposition would have saved much time if he had learned in his childhood the lesson which., this little fellow had mastered—that of “keeping still.”
If a hard word hurts, it will not make it easier to make an angry reply. If you do not answer at all, it stops right there: if your tongue cannot be restrained, nobody knows what the result will be.
It doesn’t matter so much, what your playmate says, so long as you keep your temper and hold your tongue. It is what you reply to him, nine times out of ten, that makes the quarrel. Let him say his say, and be clone with it: then you will find the whole annoyance done with much more readily than if you had “freed your mind” in return.
“Just keeping still” is one of the things that saves time, trouble, wretchedness in This world.
“If ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.” 1 Peter 2:2020For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. (1 Peter 2:20).
ML-11/17/1935