A Scotch botanist sallied forth to the hills one bright day to study his favorite flowers. Presently he plucked a heather bell and put it upon the glass of his microscope. He stretched himself at length upon the ground and began to scrutinize it through the microscope. Moment after moment passed and still he lay there gazing, entranced by the beauty of the little flower. Suddenly a shadow fell upon the ground where he lay. Looking up he saw a tall, weather-beaten shepherd gazing down with a smile of half-concealed amusement at a man spending his time looking through a glass at so common a thing as a heather bell. Without a word the botanist reached up and handed the shepherd the microscope. He placed it to his eye and began to gaze. For him, too, moment after moment sped by while he gazed in enraptured silence. When he handed back the glass the botanist noticed that the tears were streaming down his bronzed cheeks and falling on the ground at his feet.
“What’s the matter,” said the botanist. “Isn’t it beautiful?” “Beautiful?” said the shepherd, “It is beautiful beyond all words. But I am thinking of how many thousands of them I have trodden under foot!”
Have you ever thought how many opportunities to accept Christ you have trodden under foot in your lifetime? God’s opportunity is now. “Now is the accepted time.” He has no other. It only takes one short minute of time to make one of God’s “now’s” of opportunity. So you have sixty now’s every hour of your life. That means a thousand for the waking hours of each day. That means hundreds of thousands for every year of your life, and many millions ere your span of earthly existence is ended. Opportunity, with her millions of now’s, will be against you in that last great assize! I fancy I hear her voice on the witness stand. “A thousand times a day I came to him. I was with him in the tender hours and influences of youth. I came to him in the pleadings of his sainted mother. I drew near him in the hours of bereavement and sorrow. I spoke to him in the tender solicitations of devoted friends. I touched him in the prayers and pleadings of his clearest ones. I sounded the warning hundreds of times from the pulpit. I whispered to him in the night-watches as he lay in the silence of his own thoughts and the convictions of his own accusing conscience. Yet for all these years has he unceasingly trodden me under foot.”
Unsaved friend, there are souls in the awful place of the lost who would give a million worlds for just one more of the precious nows you are treading under foot. And when you see these trampled nows in the light of eternity, you too will weep with unspeakable agony in the realization that not one of them will ever return.
J. H. McConkey.