They Decided Not To Be

There are a lot of things in our world that could make us all very discouraged. A lot of our forefathers could have given up on this business of making a land of freedom. They could have been quitters…but “they decided not to be”.

As you read the New Testament, and see the persecution of early Christians, and the hardships of the apostle Paul and read how he was beaten, imprisoned, stoned and left for dead, it would have been easy to get discouraged. But those early founders of the Faith decided not to be. And I’m glad.

There are two ways to be defeated. Sometimes, we lose at a game or in business, or from superior salesmanship by someone else. That’s one way.

But the other way is when we are caught in self-defeat…when we throw in the sponge, and declare that the odds are against us. Most of the time, people are not defeated by things, but by themselves. We give in. We quit.

We know about Helen Keller, blind, deaf and dumb, from birth. Glen Cunningham, one of the fastest milers on record at 4.4 seconds was crippled in his boyhood in a schoolhouse fire. Doctors said he would never walk again. John Bunyan wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress” while in prison, on untwisted papers that were stoppers in the bottles of milk brought to him. “Don Quixote” was written from prison, as was Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World”. Beethoven was claimed at last by deafness, but he continued to write some of his greatest musical works. Alec Templeton, blind from early in life, became a great pianist. Napoleon was only 5 feet 2 1/4 inches tall. He graduated 43^rd in his class. Michaelangelo, who was lame and had a broken nose, lay flat on his back for 20 months painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

All of them had plenty of reasons to say: “Stop the world, I want to get off”...but they decided not to.

As people get older, they feel they are getting useless, and yet Verdi wrote an opera at eighty, and at that same age, Goethe finished writing “Faust”. Oliver Wendell Holmes was still writing brilliant opinions at ninety and Louis Pasteur was past sixty when he began his studies that led to a cure for rabies.

The early Christians learned from Paul to say: “For me to live is Christ”. They could have been badly defeated, but “they decided not to be”.

I suppose most of us could have our feelings hurt dozens of times every week. But, what’s the point? Most of the time when someone hurts me, it’s their problem, not mine. They got out of bed on the wrong side…their spouse gave them a rough time….they’ve got “gas” or a tummy-ache.

There is an old sign on a print shop that read: “Life is a grindstone, and whether it grinds a man down or polishes him up depends on the stuff he’s made of”.

I could probably be unhappy, un-Christian, unpleasant, and a few more “un”-things. But I’ve decided not to be.