Three courses

   Let’s examine three men who are leaving any one period of life behind them and go out into a new one; one of them is driven out of his past and leaves it only because he cannot stay there and help himself;

Another goes forth from his past because he has grown weary and disgusted with it or the past has grown tame and the future may offer something new, he is willing to flee from it for the pure love of change;

The third leaves his past full of honor, full of gratitude for the equipment which it has given him for his future life and leaves with the eager hope that the Lord is at hand, and with larger circumstances and with mature powers he will come nearer to Christ and more useful in His service. He has the mind of a discoverer, who has gathered all the knowledge and character which he could gain at home, and is now eager to use them in reading the secret of some hidden country or place to make the world larger and better for mankind.

  Now the first two men will doubtless find the new page like the last, another great flat plain on which they may wander pleasantly, but aimlessly. Always coming back at last to the dead campfires where they had slept before. Their tomorrow will be as their today.

The third man, the noble soul, as with most earnest men and women, has thought of his life as an unfolding of God’s will for them.

The power of any life lies in its expectancy. “What do you hope for? What do you expect? The answer to these questions is the measure of the degree in which a man is living.

Am I truly expecting a higher, deeper, more pervading revelation of Christ and His work for me? If not, what hope is there that tomorrow will be different from today?

Paraphrased from Phillips Brooks, "The Great Expectation."