The other day I was visiting a little friend who had been ill for fourteen long months, through two winters and one summer. He had gone to bed near Christmas and had been a little invalid all that year, and through the next Christmas. His name is Frederick. He has a sister just his own age to the very day, and her name is Florence. Florence went to school and learned to write and add and subtract and do other queer things. Frederick stayed in bed, kept very quiet and read. He was only seven, but he read all sorts of books, and when he could not read others read to him, his nurse, his father, or his mother, or Billy or Betty, and he came to know a lot of history and science and fairy tales.
One day when I was telling him about the big world outside, and the coming of spring with its buds and leaves and flowers he chuckled and said, “Some day this world will be just like the moon.''What do you think of that? What did he mean? I thought perhaps he had been reading Robert Louis Stevenson who said that:
“The moon has a face like the clock in the hall
It shines on thieves on the garden wall.”
Then I thought perhaps it was Mother Goose he was thinking of:
“The man in the moon
Came tumbling down
And asked the way to Norwich.
He went by the south
And burnt his mouth
With supping cold pease-porridge.”
I soon knew, however, that he was not thinking about fancies and fairies, but about facts, and I said, “Why do you think so?” “Well,” said he in a wise sort of way, “don’t you know the moon is dead and some day this world will be dead just like the moon.” Of course I knew that. Everybody knows that. The moon is dead. Nothing lives in the moon. Nothing ever happens there. No storms, no lightning, no noise, no dust, no twilight, no blue sky, nothing happens in the moon. There is no life, no air there, and the sky is as black as ink. It has no weather. It is a dead world.
No wonder “the man in the moon has a crick in his back. Whee! Whim! Ain’t you sorry for him?” Perhaps this is why people have always thought the moon harmed people and made them go out of their heads, as we say. Do you remember the Psalm that says, “The sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon by night?” You can have a moonstroke, as well as a sunstroke. All dead things are bad, and a dead world like the moon may have a bad influence on people, especially on young people who stay out late at night.
I said, “Yes, the moon is dead, a dead, dead world, but how beautiful it is and how wonderful it is at night. How is that? If it is dead how is it so full of light?” And I repeated the verse:
“Moon, so round and yellow,
Looking from on high,
How I love to see you
Shining in the sky.
Oft and oft I wonder,
When I see you there,
How they get to light you,
Hanging in the air.”
Then Frederick turned over and said with a laugh, “Don’t you know? Why, it’s the sun that makes the moon beautiful. The moon is dead, but the sun shines on it, and makes it shine.” And then I thought that we, too, are something like the moon, sort of dead and dull and useless, until Jesus, the great sun of our life, shines upon us and lights up our lives. The only way for us to be bright and useful is to have Jesus shine upon us. If we stay near Him we will be like Him.
Frederick is well now and lives out in a real live world and some day when I see him I am going to preach this story-sermon to him and then read and explain to him this sermon-story in rhyme:
“A Persian fable says: One day
A wanderer found a lump of clay
So redolent of sweet perfume,
Its odors scented all the room.
‘What art thou?’ was his quick demand;
‘Art thou some gem from the Samarkand,
Or Spikenard in this rude disguise,
Or other costly merchandise?’
‘Nay! I am but a lump of clay
‘Then whence this wondrous sweetness—say?’
‘Friend, if the secret I disclose,
I have been dwelling with the rose!”
Perhaps that verse of poetry is rather hard for little children to understand, but its meaning is very simple. It means that just as a piece of clay which has no sweetness in itself may become fragrant by being in the same place with a rose, so we too may become sweet and lovely by living in the presence of Jesus. The sweetness of the rose sweetens the clay, and the love and beauty of our Lord make us kind and sweet also. I am sure Frederick will understand both the story and the sermon. Kerr
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