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Show His Growing Years Lesson for January 16, 1919 r) OUBTLESS God can do any-thing any-thing he wants to do. He could have sent Jesus to earth on a moonbeam; moon-beam; he could have had him for the first 30 vears of his life on a lonely peak in the Andes, far from any human dwelling; dwell-ing; he could have sent him into the , world full-grown, I without ever hav-I hav-I ing to go through ' the grind of growing grow-ing and learning as Dr. Foreman the rest of us do. But God did not plan it that way. If the manhood of Jesus was to be real, and not a hothouse facsimile, he had to come up the hard way. Angels do not grow, they just are; but human beings grow. The great difference between Jesus and ordinary ordi-nary mortals is not that they grow and he did not; the difference is that he grew straight. No 'Good Chance' ' I 'HE world around us makes its impression on us; it makes no impression on dolls. They go on smiling their built-in, painted-on smiles, but we have to learn through tears. And so did Jesus. The heavenly Father saw to it that his experiences were not always easy ones. He was born in a stable, of parents who were very poor, living liv-ing the first few years of his life as a displaced person in a foreign country, with a price on his baby head. He grew up in a village "off the main iine," among companions com-panions not one of whom ever became famous, working through long years at a simple and not too well-paid trade. During Jesus' first 30 years his neighbors never guessed that the most extraordinary person of history was living in their village. We sometimes wish that we had an easier time of it, and that God had seen fit to cast our lot in some big city with a rich family, instead in-stead of where we are. We feel we could be better people If we "had a chance." Yet every reader of these lines has a far better chance |