Unbroken By Failure

Unbroken by Failure

He was seven years old when his family lost their Indiana farm. He had to drop out of school and go to work. Two years later his beloved mother died. When he was twenty-two years old he started a business. Within a year, it went belly up. He ran for the state legislature and lost. Someone hired him to run a store but fired him a few months later. So he applied to law school only to be rejected. A friend loaned him money to start another business. Within a year, he filed for bankruptcy. It took him seventeen years to pay off his debt.

Again he made a run at politics. He finally got a rare taste of success. The year he took office, he got engaged. It seemed that fortune was finally smiling on him. But on the eve of their wedding, his fiancée died of typhoid fever, and he plunged into suicidal despair. He spent the next six months in bed.

He recovered enough to get back into the political game but was defeated. His friends tried to cheer him up by pushing him into an arranged marriage. It would be the great disaster of his life, consigning him to twenty-three years with a difficult wife.

Again he ran for public office, suffering yet another defeat. Then his three-year-old son Edward died. After a season of grief, he finally won an election, only to lose his bid for reelection. When he limped home from Washington, DC, he ran for some minor office in his home state, only to be rejected again.

After licking his wounds for five years, he ran for the US Senate and lost. Sympathetic colleagues nominated him for vice president. He finished dead last among all the candidates. Two years later, he picked himself off the floor and ran for the senate a second time. Again he was defeated, giving him the dubious distinction of being the biggest political loser in US history.

It’s a miracle that two years later he somehow found the courage to run for America’s highest office. In 1860, after decades of political failures and personal setbacks, Abraham Lincoln became the sixteenth president of the United States.

But his euphoria was short lived. As the country careened toward civil war, he was vilified across the South. Newspapers lampooned him, calling him the Gorilla from Illinois. When the Union dissolved, there were calls for the president’s impeachment. His generals refused his orders, and cabinet members plotted against him. His eleven-year-old son died, and his wife descended into madness. In the end, he was denied the pleasure of savoring his greatest triumph when he was assassinated only six days after the Civil War ended.

As he stood by Lincoln’s deathbed, the secretary of state whispered, “He now belongs to the ages.” Two days later, on Good Friday, preachers across America eulogized Lincoln as the savior of our nation. If you have gone through a long stretch of defeats and are ready to throw in the towel, you might want to remember Abraham Lincoln’s story in the light of something Leo Tolstoy wrote:

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

Wait patiently for the LORD. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the LORD.

Psalm 27:14