LOVELY LIVES NEVER END!
Today’s Message of Encouragement from Discovering a BETTER LIFE MINISTRIES
(Stories of Real People, Real Events, Real Places)
And are dedicated to HELPING
PEOPLE FIND PEACE and HOPE
(John 10:10)
(March 31st, 2020)
LOVELY LIVES NEVER END!
Friends, some of you may have seen the old movie, Angels with Dirty Faces, in which James Cagney took the starring role. Cagney played the part of Rocky, a ruthless criminal who was making a big impression with the youth of his old hometown. The kids followed Rocky’s escapades with smiles. In fact, they began to act and talk like him, and they began to sneer at the work and words of a long-trusted priest who was a boyhood friend of Rocky’s.
The priest (who was played by Pat O’Brien) loves the gangster, but hates that the boys see him as a hero and are trying to model themselves after him. So the priest pleads with Rocky to put an end to the bad influence he is having on the boys. Rocky just laughs it off. But finally, he’s arrested, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to die for killing some fellow criminals. However, the teenagers are thrilled with Rocky’s defiant attitude and become even more set against goodness and uprightness.
Consequently, the priest goes to the gangster on death row and pleads with him to kill his image in the eyes of the boys. His old friend tells him, that his evil influence will be even stronger after his death if he dies defiant and heroic. The end result of that conversation was that Rocky pretends to be a coward as he is taken to the electric chair. He begs and screams for mercy even while the guards are jeering at him for being “all sizzle and no steak.”
Perhaps Angels with Dirty Faces was a silly old movie. And yet, isn’t it interesting, how a lovely deed in an otherwise shabby life can take on a life of its own?
Friends, a thousand stories from fiction and daily living can illustrate the power of a lovely human life. For instance, Frank Boreham, in his book The Three Half-Moons, tells of an incident one evening, when he and a group of friends were walking home. They happened to pass an older man called Douglas, who had been nicknamed “Groggy” because he had been a hard drinker in his youth.
That evening, as they came closer to him, Douglas seemed to be stumbling, and one of the group thought he might have been drinking.
Another who knew him better, however, said that was highly unlikely. After some discreet and well-meaning inquiries, Frank Boreham drew the conclusion that the old man had just come from the cemetery, which is where Boreham headed. And there on a corner was a grave adorned with fresh pink flowers. It was the grave and the birthday of Jessie Glencairn.
Following his visit to the cemetery, Frank Boreham dropped by to see Douglas. He found him in his garden and noted the clumps of pink carnations, but said nothing.
A couple of years later, as if he were continuing a conversation, Douglas confessed that Jessie was the only woman he had ever loved. He went on to say that it was almost blasphemy for him to say he loved her, because she was so far above him. He confessed that he had been a terrible drunk, but he went on to say, that from the day he looked straight into Jessie’s eyes, “I never touched the drink again.”
Douglas told Frank that he knew it wasn’t for the likes of him to love her, but he would love to have seen Jessie marry a good man, even though it would have made him envious enough to have bitten his tongue off.
Jessie never knew how Douglas felt about her, but one day, when they happened to be walking in the same direction, he told her that people were saying he would soon be back on the drink. -- “She gave me a look I’ll never forget to my dying day,” he said, “and told me she was certain I never would.”
Then he went on to tell Frank that sometimes when the craving raged, he seemed to see Jessie with that look on her face and those words on her lips, and he felt he hated the stuff. And then he said, however difficult it was, “I knew I’d be safe as long as I felt the same toward her.”
“That, I fancied, “was the end of it,” Frank Boreham said. And then he went on to say, “I forgot that a lovely life never ends!”
Thirty years later, when old Jamie McBride died, one of his personal effects was a love letter written to him by Jessie Glencairn. She wrote of her grief that their sweet dreams of life together would have to be set aside because she had tuberculosis, which would soon kill her.
She went on to say in her letter, that while she couldn’t allow Jamie to marry her, “I shall be proud, even on my deathbed, to think that you loved me and would have me as your wife. . . . I shall go down to my grave praying that the best things in this life may be always yours; and, if the dead can bless the living, I shall breathe constant benedictions on you and those who are dear to you.”
Frank Boreham immediately made this letter known to Douglas, who, after having thought about it for a while, went to his garden, gathered an armful of pink carnations, and divided them into two large bunches. One bunch he placed on the lonely grave in the corner, the second bunch he placed on the fresh mound over Jamie McBride, who had died unmarried.
As he observed these tender actions of Douglas, Frank Boreham said, “It is a luxury to be living in a world in which it is possible for a girl to die of tuberculosis in her thirties and yet to go on sweetening and brightening the lives of two lonely men, until blessing her memory, each of them, full of years and honour, goes down to his quiet grave.”
Friend, as you think about what I’ve shared with you today, I hope you’ll never forget that lovely lives never end!
“Every act of kindness is
An expression of love, and
Everyone deserves to be loved.”
(Richard Carlson,Ph.D.)
Friend, I’m so glad you took the time to read this message. However, if you would like help in obtaining a fresh look at God’s incredible love for you, we invite you to write to Discovering A BETTER LIFE, P.O. Box 1540, Albany, Western Australia 6331 and ask for our FREE booklet titled “THE RELENTLESS LOVE of GOD!” This booklet has a beautiful message that provides Hope for Those Who Do Not Feel Loved by God.
Email your request to us at: abl-alb@omninet.net.au
Or Phone your request for “THE RELENTLESS LOVE of GOD!” on: 98 418 418
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