SUFFERING

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men (187-196)

• We have all been done a great disservice. We have been taught what I call the statue version of history. By this I mean that we have been taught a version of history that presents the heroes of the past as moral giants who fell flawless from the womb, who achieved fame almost effortlessly. It hasn't served us well.
• The great heroes of the past you've grown to admire were all pitiful human beings whom we remember only because they declared war on some part of their pitifulness.
• God sets destinies in heaven, but those destinies have to hammered out on earth one arduous minute at a time. We strain. We bleed. We grieve. We have to conquer each step. No one gets a pass. No one moves to the head of the line, even if he gets a statue. Everyone is flawed.
• John Wesley was a great man...Yet his marriage was so bad that when a friend went to pick him up for a meeting, the man found Wesley's wife dragging the great preacher around the house by the hair...the woman pretty much despised her husband.
• Winston Churchill: He was a great man. One of the greatest. 
• And yet, he was in debt every day of his adult life. 
• His marriage was often troubled. 
• One of his children committed suicide. 
• He once made a decision that threw his entire country into economic turmoil. 
• He was, for a long period, the most hated political figure in his nation. 
• Even when he was the leader of that nation, he refused to spend the night in a room with a balcony...he suffered from horrible bouts of depression...feared that one day the darkness would come for him and he would try to jump to his death...
• Abraham Lincoln: His best friend said he dripped melancholy as he walked. 
• Another said he had the saddest face he ever saw.
• He once wrote "I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall every be better I cannot tell; I awfully forbade I shall not."
• He was haunted all his life by the thought of rain falling on graves
• He was chronically, manically depressed.
• Friends once had to "remove razors from his room - take away all knives and other such dangerous things - it was terrible."
• He even wrote a poem about suicide
• This is one of the great truths of life. Great men suffer greatly in order to be great. Heroic men must first endure heroic struggles with themselves. I've never read about a great man or woman of whom this was not true.
• The question we all face is not whether or not we have defects. We do. Every one of us. The question is whether we are capable of envisioning a life defined by forces greater than the weight of our flaws.
• Manly men know themselves, work to understand their God-ordained uniqueness and their unique brand of damage, and accept they will always be a work in progress, always be a one-man construction project that is never quite finished in this life. They don't despair. They don't settle. They don't expect perfection of themselves. They understand that destiny is in the hand of God. They also understand that these destinies are fashioned in a man's struggle against the enemies of his soul.
• "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot...and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that's precisely why I succeed." - Michael Jordan