How easy it is to worry over the troubles that loom up in the future. “Oh, how shall we meet them!” we exclaim. “Oh, I do not see what I shall do!” and we fear and tremble before them. Nearly all the joy is excluded from some people’s lives by the shadow of coming troubles; but when those troubles come upon us, we someway, somehow, pass through them. Many of them, and sometimes very threatening ones, disappear entirely before we reach them; and the others, when they do come, are usually not nearly so bad as we had thought they were going to be. We always find a way through them. Many times we are surprized at the ease with which we overcome them. One brother who had been troubled all his life was finally enabled to see that the Lord always made a way through for him, and in speaking of it he said, “Things nearly always turn out better than I think they are going to.”
A young brother and I once had an experience that well illustrates how trouble works. We were going to meeting one night. There was such a heavy fog, that we could see only a few feet ahead of us. Suddenly there loomed before us what appeared to be a great giant. He came striding toward us through the fog with legs twenty feet long and body towering up out of sight. It was an awe-inspiring spectacle and at first sight startled us. There it was, coming right toward us in a most threatening manner. If we had been frightened and had run away, we might have had a great story to tell; but we continued walking on toward it, when suddenly we came face to face with one of our neighbors. He was only an ordinary-sized man, and there was nothing terrible about him; but he was carrying a lantern, which swung partly behind him, and as he walked threw that gigantic shadow forward into the fog. The giant that we saw was not the real man; it was only his shadow.
That is just the way trouble comes. The thing we see is not really the approaching trouble in its true size and shape; it is only the shadow of it that we see. Our imagination pictures it as something terrible, and we worry and live in its shadow for days and weeks, only to find at last that we have been scared by a shadow and that the real trouble is only a fraction of what we supposed it would be.