When I was young, I used to hear my predecessors tell the difficult stories of their youth.  Still, occasionally, you hear someone tell horrendous stories from their youth.  My secretary, Shirley, tells me that growing up in Niagara Falls, New York, in the winter, she had to walk through ten feet of snow, seven miles uphill - both ways - just to get to the Catholic school.  When she got there, she was so terrified of the teachers that she didn’t open her mouth.  (Do you believe that???)  In actuality, the challenging experiences of our lives either make us or break us.  We are defined by those difficult experiences.

When I went to seminary, it was a very difficult time, but those three years helped me to develop a perseverance that served me well in later years.  I lived in one room of a ladies house for $2 a day; I paid my car payment of $125 a month; my tuition was $425 a semester; I worked as a youth minister at First Methodist Church in West Point, Georgia, for $575 a month.  I usually only ate vegetable soup and yogurt because that was all I could afford.

School itself was challenging.  I have spoken and written many times about how unprepared I was for seminary.  I studied many hours a day and had to outline the books - sometimes paragraph by paragraph - to understand what was being taught.  I don’t believe I slept any more than 5 hours a night and I would drink only one Coke going to West Point each week to celebrate that I had finished that week in seminary.  To deal with the pressure, I ran about 100 miles a week.

When my mother would give me my Christmas presents, I would return them for cash.  I sold most of my college clothes to other students or teenagers in youth groups.  When my car broke down, I hitchhiked from Atlanta to West Point until I could afford to fix it.  When I graduated from seminary, I had one suit and two pairs of jeans that were threadbare.  Most of my running clothes were so washed out that, whatever patterns had been there, were long faded away. 

Even though it was a difficult time, there was great nobility in seminary.  I believed in the dream of being a minister.  With no scholarship and very little help, God saw me through.  I learned that I could persevere through anything.  I learned that nobility has nothing to do with birth and everything to do with facing challenges.  In the intervening years, I’m blessed by that seminary experience and I always cling to the call and the noble aspects of my life.

These are hard times for many.  Yet, if we cling to our faith, through the nobility of our lives, God will see us through.  Nowhere in the book of life are we ever promised it would be easy.  I want to witness to the fact that, if we live with a noble God-given dream, no heartache or challenge can defeat us.  It doesn’t matter how challenging life is or what people say or do to us, it only matters that we serve God.  The Book of Acts is full of the stories of the apostles facing challenges.  They triumphed because they never gave up the dream of serving God and the nobility of their lives.

Our lives can be persistently noble.

Prayer:  Dear God, help us to persevere.  Amen.