Tired Feet
“My feet are wearied and ray hands are tired,
My soul oppressed,
And I desire what I have long desired — Kest, only rest.”
FATHER KYAN.
QOME time after the author’s Week-Day Re- *-’ ligion was issued, among the many kindly words received from different quarters regarding the book, there came this:” Mother, sister J. and I read a chapter a day, I usually reading aloud. It was in the spring, in house-cleaning time, and we were very weary every night. One evening J. said, ‘Now for our chapter in Week-Day Religion? My feet were very tired and sore, and I said, as I threw myself on the lounge, ‘I wonder what Mr. Miller knows about tired feet?’ My sister replied that we should see. It was the fifth chapter — ‘Cure for Care7 — that we were to read that evening, and perhaps you will remember that the chapter closes with the stanza in which are these lines:
‘And if through patient toil we reach the land Where tired feet with sandals loose may rest.’
Was not that rather a singular coincidence? I am sure that, coming as it did, it was a real word from God for me, and it brought me new strength in my weariness.”
This pleasant testimony regarding a chance phrase in another volume has suggested to me for this book a whole chapter on “tired feet.” The close of every day finds a great many persons with feet tired and sore. There are some people whose duties require them to walk all day. There are the men who patrol the city’s streets, the guardians of our homes; there are the postmen who bring the letters to our doors; there are the messengers who are always hurrying to and fro on their errands; there are the pilgrims who travel on foot along the hard, dusty highways; there are those who follow the plough or perform other parts of the farmer’s work. Then there are those whose duties require them to be on their feet most of the day, either standing or walking about. Salespeople in great busy stores are scarcely ever allowed to sit down; the same is true of those employed in many factories and mills. Indeed, the larger portion of all working-people, in all branches of industry, stand the greater part of the day. Thousands of women in their home-work rarely ever sit down during the long days to rest. Up stairs and down again, from kitchen to nursery, out to the market and to the store, in and out from early morning till late at night, these busy women are ever plodding in their housewifely duties.
“Man’s work’s from sun to sun;
Woman’s work is never done.”
No wonder, then, that there are many sore and tired feet at the ending of each day. How welcome night is to the armies of weary people who then drop their tools or their yardsticks, or their other implements of toil, and hurry homeward! How good it is to sit down and rest when the day’s tasks are done! Certainly there ought to be a chapter somewhere specially for people with tired feet.
But what message of comfort is there for such? For one thing, there is the thought of duty done. It is always a comfort, when one is tired, to reflect that one has grown tired in doing one’s proper work. A squandered day, a day spent in idleness, may not leave such tired feet in the evening, but neither does it give the sweet pleasure that a busy day gives even with its blistered or aching feet.
There is a great deal of useless standing or walking about that gets none of this comfort. There are young men who stand on the street-corners all day, and ofttimes far into the night, who must have weary feet when at last they turn homeward; yet they have in their hearts no such sweet compensating satisfaction as have those who have toiled all the long hours in some honest and honorable calling. Idleness brings only shame and self-contempt. Then there are certain kinds of occupation which give to weariness no sweetening comfort. A day spent in sinful work may make tired feet, but has no soothing for them in the evening’s rest.
But all duty well done has its restful peace of heart when the tasks are finished and laid down. Conscience whispers, “You were faithful to-day. You did all that was given to you to do; you did not shirk nor skimp.” And conscience is the whisper of God. But does God take notice of one’s daily common work — ploughing, delivering letters, selling goods, cleaning house? Certainly he does. We serve him just as truly in our daily task-work as in our praying and Bible-reading. The woman who keeps the great cathedral clean, sweeping the dust from the aisles and from the pews, is serving her Lord as well, if her heart be right, as the gorgeously-robed minister who performs his sacred part in the holy worship. One of George MacDonald’s poems teaches this in a very sweet way.
“Methought that in a solemn church I stood.
Its marble acres, worn with knees and feet,
Lay spread from door to door, from street to street; Midway the form hung high upon the rood Of Him who gave his life to be our good;
Beyond, priests flitted, bowed, and murmured meet
Among the candles shining still and sweet; Men came and went, and worshiped as they could,
And still their dust a woman with her broom, Bowed to her work, kept sweeping to the door.
Then saw I, slow through all the pillared gloom,
Across the church a silent figure come. ‘Daughter,’ it said, ’ thou sweepest well my floor.’ — ‘It is the Lord I’ I cried, and saw no more.”
The thought that we have done our duty for another day and have pleased God ought to be like soothing balm to our sore and tired feet at the end of the day. Our Master’s commendation takes the sting out of any suffering endured in doing work for him. When we know that Christ in heaven has noticed our toil and has approved it, accepting it as holy service to himself, we are ready to toil another day.
Another comfort for tired feet is in the coming of night, when one can rest. The day’s tasks are finished, the rounds are all made, the store is closed, the horses are put away, the children are in bed, the housework is done, and the tired people can sit down. The tight shoes are taken off, loose slippers are substituted, and the evening’s quiet begins. Who can tell the blessings that the night brings to earth’s weary toilers? Suppose there were no night, no rest — that the heavy sandals could never be laid off, that one could never sit down, that there could be no pause in the toil; how terrible would life be! Night is a holy time, because it brings rest. The rest is all the sweeter, too, because the feet are tired and sore. Those who never have been weary do not realize the blessings which come with the night.
“Night is the time for rest.
How sweet, when labors close,
To gather round an aching breast
The curtain of repose,
Stretch the tired limbs and lay the head
Down on our own delightful bed!”
“Wonderful is the work of repair in life that goes on while we sleep. Men bring the great ships to dock after they have ploughed the waves or battled with the storms and are battered and strained and damaged, and there they are repaired and made ready to go again to sea. At night our jaded and exhausted bodies are dry-docked after the day’s conflict and toils, and while we sleep the mysterious process of restoration and reinvigoration goes on; and when morning comes we are ready to begin a new day of toil and care. We lie down tired, feeling sometimes that we can never do another day’s work; but the morning comes again, we rise renewed in body and spirit, full of enthusiasm and strong and brave for the hardest duties.
What a blessing is sleep! It charms away the weariness from the aching limbs; it brushes the clouds from the sky; it refills life’s drained fountains. One rendering of the old psalm-verse is, “So he giveth to his beloved in sleep.” Surely, God does give us many rich blessings in our sleep. Angels come with noiseless tread into our chambers and leave their holy gifts and steal away unheard. God himself comes and touches us with his benedictions while our eyes are closed in slumber; he shuts our ears to earth’s noises and holds us apart from its strifes and turmoils while he builds up again in us all that the day had torn down; he makes us forget our griefs and cares, and sends sweet dreams to restore the brightness and the gladness to our tired spirits.
There is something very wonderful in the mystery of sleep and in the way God comes to us in the darkness and the silence to bless us. Father Ryan, late poet-priest of the South, has written so exquisitely upon God’s work in the night for his children that no apology is made for the quoting here of almost the whole poem:
“Betimes I seem to see in dreams
What when awake I may not see.
Can night be God’s more than the day?
Do stars, not suns, best light his way?
Who knoweth? Blended lights and shades
Arch aisles down which he walks to me.
“I hear him coming in the night
Afar, and yet I know not how;
His steps make music low and sweet;
Sometimes the nails are in his feet.
Does darkness give God better light
Than day to find a weary brow?
“Does darkness give man brighter rays
To find the God in sunshine lost?
Must shadows wrap the trysting-place
Where God meets hearts with gentlest grace?
Who knoweth it? God hath his ways
For every soul here sorrow-tossed.
“The hours of day are like the waves
That fret against the shores of sin:
They touch the human everywhere,
The bright-divine fades in their glare,
And God’s sweet voice the spirit craves
Is heard too faintly in the din.
“When all the senses are awake,
The mortal presses overmuch
Upon the great immortal part,
And God seems farther from the heart.
Must souls, like skies when day-dawns break,
Lose star by star at sunlight’s touch?
“But when the sun kneels in the west
And gradually sinks as great hearts sink,
And in his sinking flings adown
Bright blessings from his fading crown,
The stars begin their song of rest
And shadows make the thoughtless think.
“The human seems to fade away,
And down the starred and shadowed skies
The heavenly comes, as memories come
Of home to hearts afar from home,
And through the darkness after day
Many a winged angel flies.
“And somehow, tho’ the eyes see less,
Our spirits seem to see the more;
When we look thro’ night’s shadow-bars,
The soul sees more than shining stars — Yea, sees the very loveliness
That rests upon the golden shore.”
Another comfort for tired feet is in the thought that Jesus understands the weariness. We know that his feet were tired at the end of many a day. Once we are expressly told that, being wearied with his long journey, he sat down on a well-curb to rest. He had come far through the dust and the noontide heat, and his feet were sore. All his days were busy days, for he was ever going about on errands of love. Many a day he had scarcely time to eat. Though never weary of, he was ofttimes weary in, his Father’s business.
When our feet are tired after the day’s tasks and journeys, it ought to be a very precious comfort to remember that our blessed Master had like experience, and therefore is able to sympathize with us. It is one of the chief sadnesses of many lives that people do not understand them, do not sympathize with them. They move about us, our neighbors and companions — even our closest friends — and laugh and jest and are happy and light-hearted, while we, close beside them, are suffering. They are not aware of our pain; and if they were, they could not give us real sympathy, because they have never had any experience of their own that would interpret to them our experience. Only those who have suffered in some way can truly sympathize with those who suffer. One who is physically strong and has never felt the pain of weariness cannot understand the weakness of another whom the least exertion tires. The man of athletic frame who can walk all day without fatigue has small sympathy with the man of feeble health who is exhausted in a mile.
When we think of the glory of Christ, it would seem to us at first that he cannot care for our little ills and sufferings; but when we remember that he lived on earth and knows our common life by personal experience, and that he is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities,” we know that he understands us and sympathizes with us in every pain. When we think of him sitting weary on the well-curb after his long, hard journey, we are sure that even in heaven he knows what tired feet mean to us after our day of toil. The comfort even of human sympathy, without any real relief, puts new strength and courage into the heart of one who suffers; the assurance of the sympathy of Christ ought to lift the weary one above all weakness, above all faintness, into victorious joy.
We should remember, too, that Christ’s sacred feet were wounded that our feet may be soothed in their pain and weariness and at last may stand on the golden streets of heaven. There is a legend of Christ which tells of his walking by the sea, beautiful in form, wearing brown sandals upon his feet. A poet puts it thus:
“He walked beside the sea; he took his sandals off To bathe his weary feet in the pure cool wave — For he had walked across the desert sands All day long — and as he bathed his feet He murmured to himself, ‘Three years! Three years I And then, poor feet, the cruel nails will come And make you bleed, but that blood will lave All weary feet on all their thorny ways.’”
There is still another comfort for tired feet in the hope of the rest that is waiting. This incessant toil is not to go on for ever. We are going to a land where the longest journeys will produce no weariness, where “tired feet with sandals loose may rest” from all that tires. The hope of heaven, shining in glory such a little way before, ought to give us courage and strength to endure whatever of pain, conflict and suffering may come to us in these short days.
“The burden of my days is hard to bear,
But God knows best;
And I have prayed — but vain has been my prayer — For rest, sweet rest.”
“‘Twill soon be o’er;
Far down the west
Life’s sun is setting, and I see the shore Where I shall rest.”