Strength and Struggle…

A sentence from Longfellow suggests a subject: “Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad.”

The fact is that all people have their problems, and life can be, and often is such a struggle that we marvel at the wonderful way in which people carry their problems and bravely endure them from day to day. It seems apparent that struggle was meant to be, for it is by struggle that strength comes.

Many years ago Phillips Brooks gave a sermon called The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire in which he said: “When a man conquers his adversaries and his difficulties it is not as if he had never encountered them. Their power…is in all his future life. They are not only events in his past history, they are elements in all his present character…. His…body carries with it not only the record, but the power of all it has passed through…. He is stronger by the…strength of trial….”

But there are some you say who “live strongly and purely in this world…and then go safely and serenely up to heaven, who have no struggle anywhere, who never know what struggle is…who never had a disappointment, who never knew a want,” who never had a problem of health⎯men “on whom every sun shines…. What shall we say of them?”

If we suppose this, it is simply because we do not know enough. “None knows the weight of another’s burden,” said George Herbert. “You may search all the ages for [a person who has had no problems], you may look through the…streets of heaven, asking each [one] how he came there, and you will look in vain everywhere for a man morally and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come to him in struggle. …Do [not] suppose that [there is any man who] has never wrestled with his own success and happiness…. There is no exception anywhere. Every true strength is gained in struggle.”

“And again, I would that ye should learn that he only is saved who endureth unto the end.”