The True Christian Never Has To Give Up Anything ...

“The true Christian never has to give up anything (of course I am not speaking of sins), but there are a lot of things that will give him up. They will go one by one. There will be no grief. It will be the way childish occupations are abandoned.

“I never had to give up playing with tops and marbles. I never had to come to the place where I said, ‘Oh, I am a big boy now, and big boys shouldn’t play marbles. So I will make a great effort to give up playing marbles.’ It did not happen that way.

“One day I was playing marbles with a group of small boys and some older boys came by. They looked at me and said, ‘Hey, kid, can you field a ball?’ ‘Sure I can,’ I replied with more vigor than accuracy. ‘Well,’ they said, ‘we are short a fielder. Get out there and see what you can do.’

“I went out and was ready to play my head off to keep up with the older fellows.

When it was my turn to bat I was ready to swing till I burst, and to run till I dropped, and do all that I could to keep up with the bigger company I was in. And when the game was over and we older boys, as I then classed myself, walked down the street past the little fellows who were playing marbles, I did not go back to marbles. I had graduated. “