If We Knew What Would Happen Tomorrow~We Would Lose Alertness

The next thing that we should lose would be the spirit of vigorous alertness.

And of that we have a kind of parable in what we see in the animals.

Suppose, for instance, that you catch a bird and take it into the safety of your home. 

And every day you tend it and feed it until at length it learns that food is certain.

Do you know what happens, although you might not guess it?

Do you know what every naturalist knows?

Every instinct of that little captive is silently but surely being dulled.

Once it was wild and everything was dark. 

The bird was at its best when things were dark.

Once it didn't know where its breakfast was when it awoke at dawn and was hungry. 

But now it knows - you are its little providence, and you have taught it what will come.

And it is very sweet to have that certainty, but something better than sweetness is departing.

And that is what would happen to you and me could we see the content of tomorrow.

It might be sweet, but what man cares for that if something better than sweetness were to go.

I want a life responsive and alert. 

I want to be quick to see and to hear and to seize upon the will of God.

And what I say is, that this fine alertness, which is the mark of progress and of victory, would be more difficult a thousand times were we always certain of tomorrow.

Many of you here have been to London. Well, what happened when you went to London?

Didn't you cover more ground in one day than many a Londoner does in half a year? He knows it all, every street of it, every park of it and every palace.

You are alert because it is unknown.

Or to put it another way, here is a man who has to sail for India in six months. He is home on furlough - he has six months to rest - and he gets so fat that you would hardly know him.

But here is another man, a soldier, who any hour may get his call to active duty, and I tell you that is the man who is alert.

No wandering very far from where his home is. 

No laying long plans for a fine summer. 

He knows that sooner or later he must go, perhaps tonight. 

That man may lose a little as anyone does when he chooses to live the soldier's life. 

But he is always fit and always ready, and it is the uncertainty that makes him so. 

So is it with the uncertainty of death. 

So with the uncertainty of trial. 

And it is just the darkness of it all, the feeling that we don't know what may come, that helps us to be watchful every day.

~George Morrison~