help getting
light or heat. Well, if you turn on the
law of giving, you cannot help receiving,
can you?
The greatest blessing that ever came into my life--and I mean concrete, material blessing, too, and not some imaginary or vague uplift of spirit--came when I took up a bit of service I was asked to perform at a time when I was in what I thought desperate straits for material things. It looked as if there was not a chance in the world that any money would come to me as a result of this service. It was not a service for which money is paid. I have never been paid for it in money. As I continued in the service I did not see that it produced any opportunity to get money. All that it produced was the opportunity to give more unremunerative service. Plenty of people were willing to have me serve them in certain ways. But I had made up my mind that giving was the way to receiving, and I had the sense to stick to it--or I may better say, I was led to stick to it simply because I was trying to find out how to obey the law. I thought it was not going to pay. I was accustomed to saying that I had tried everything and that nothing produced for me, and I grew discouraged and desperate. But all the time I got along; I was taken care of--in what I thought little ways and ways that did not satisfy me, to be sure; but I was encouraged to go on serving.
Emerson says: "If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Every
150
