The Buttered Side of Your Bread


Thou has granted me life and favor.--Job. 10: 12.

Life would be less puzzling and more satisfying, if we had a deeper sense of what is good in it, with a corresponding gratitude to God.

One thing that makes life hard and unhappy for many of us is the failure to recognize how favored and well off we are.

There is a saying by Robert Louis Stevenson to the effect that the French, as a whole, have a “clear, unflinching recognition by everybody of his own luck. They know,” he says, “on which side their bread is buttered and take a pleasure in showing it to others, which is surely the better part of religion.”

It is bad enough for one to be overly conscious of his difficulties and troubles, but it is all the worse when he goes about parading them before his neighbors and bemoaning his terrible luck.

We never make conditions easier by telling ourselves how awful our troubles are. Nor does it ever help matters to go around telling a hard-luck story to everybody who will listen to us.

William George Jordan speaks of “men who do not syndicate their sorrows.” Of them he says:: “They do not study their lives as under a microscope, then throw their miseries and troubles enlarged upon a screen and proceed to deliver a lecture on them.”

Just watch these men, and you will find that they are the ones who get along the easiest and the best.

If you are in a bad situation and need help, you should make it known. If you are at the end of your resources and can't go on without help, you have the right to seek assistance. But there is no advantage to be gained by needlessly advertising your troubles.

If you are in trouble, the first and most important thing to do is to tell it to God, who is “an ever present help in the time of trouble.”

The world will treat you better and give you a better chance if you will keep the unbuttered side of your bread a little more concealed and display a little more the buttered side.