I WISH, I wish,” said a little boy, who awoke early one morning and lay in bed thinking, “I wish I was grown up, so as to do some good. If I was a judge, I would explain the laws; or I might be a missionary; or I could get rich, and give away so much to poor people; but I am only a little boy, and it will take me a great many years to grow up.”
And so was he going to put off doing good till then?
“Well,” he said to himself, while he was dressing, “I know what I can do. I can be good: that’s left to little boys.”
Therefore, when he was dressed, he knelt and asked God to help him to be good and try to serve Him all day with his heart, and not forget. Then he went down stairs to finish his lessons.
No sooner was he seated with his book before him than his mother called him to find his little brother. Charlie did not want to leave his lesson; yet he cheerfully said, “I’ll go, mother,” and away he ran.
And how do you think he found “Eddie”? With a sharp axe in his hand! “I chop,” he said; and quite likely the next moment he would have chopped off his little toes. Charlie only thought of minding his mother; but who can tell if his ready obedience did not save his baby brother from being a cripple for life?
As Charlie was going on an errand for his mother, he saw a poor woman whose foot had slipped on the newly-made ice, and she fell; and in falling she had spilled her basket of nuts and apples, and some wicked boys were snatching up her apples and running off with them. Little Charlie stopped, and said, “Let me help you to pick up your nuts and apples;” and his nimble fingers quickly helped her out of her trouble. He did not know how his kind act comforted the poor woman long after she got home, and how she prayed God to bless him.
At dinner, as his father and mother were talking, his father said, roughly, “I shall not do anything for that man’s son: the old man always did his best to injure me.”
“But, father,” said Charlie, looking up into his father’s face, “does not the Bible say that we must return good for evil?”
Charlie did not know that his father thought all the afternoon of what his little boy had said, and that he once murmured to himself, “My boy is more of a Christian than I am. I must be a better man.”
When Charlie came home from school at night, he found that his dear little canary bird was dead.
“O, mother! and I took such care of Birdie, and I loved him so, and he sang so sweetly.” And the little boy burst into tears over his poor favorite. His mother tried to comfort him.
“Who gave Birdie’s life, and who took it again?” she asked, stroking his head gently.
“God,” he answered, through his tears; “and He knows best;” and he tried to quiet himself.
A lady, who was a visitor, was sitting in the room at the time. She had lost her two children, and, though she hoped they had taken angels’ wings and gone to nestle in the heavenly land, she would rather have had her little sons back to her nest again. But when she beheld Charlie’s patience and submission to his Father in heaven, she said, “I, too, will trust Him, like this little child.”
When Charlie laid his head on his pillow that night, he thought, “I am too little to do good; but, oh, I do want to be good, and to love the Saviour, who came down from heaven to die for me.”
ML 12/31/1916