Danger of Sluggishness

We fail not because of handicaps, not because of a blighted background, not because of inadequate opportunity, but usually because of unwarranted, uncalled for, unmitigated sluggishness.

 

Don’t say you have no chance, but remember:

• Isaac Newton, the greatest astronomer of his day, once peddling cabbages in the street;
• Martin Luther singing in the public square for any pennies he might pick up;
• John Bunyan mending kettles;
• Prideaux, the world-renowned scholar and theologian, scouring pots and pans to work his way through college;
• Bowditch, the scientist, beginning his useful learning and affluent career by reading the books that had been driven ashore from a shipwreck at Salem;
• Oberoi starting as a sweeper in a third-rate hotel that didn’t even rate one star, then creating the largest Asian-owned hotel chain in the world.
• Elder Kim fled from North Korea with Dr. Han.  Both of them arrived in Seoul penniless.  Elder Kim established an insurance company and gave as much as 70 percent of the Young Nak Church income in the early days.
• Dr. Benjamin Moraes in Brazil began with every conceivable obstacle against him.  He earned four Ph.D.s, wrote the penal code of Brazil, and built the Copacabana Presbyterian Church, one of the most influential churches in the western hemisphere.

There is a flower in Siberia that blooms only in January, the severest month of that cold climate.  It is a star-shaped flower covered with glistening specks that look like diamonds.  On the coldest day of January this flower pushes back the snow and ice and bursts into full bloom.  It is called the “snow flower.”

The life of this flower is a beautiful example of the life of that individual whom the world, the flesh, and the Devil try to freeze out and snow under, but who, in the strength of God, pushes through and up and out, and blooms in the hardiest weather of this world’s cold treatment, starred and radiant, with a beauty given only to those who find life a struggle and turn it into a victory.

John Edmund Haggai