If you met Lincoln along various points of his life’s journey, it wouldn’t have been until about a year before he was elected president that you’d have thought much of him. He was simple, poor and incredibly awkward, but this was actually an improvement on where he used to be in life. At first he was poor AND uneducated, unable to even read. His stepmother helped him to get a decent education though, and over the years Lincoln borrowed a lot of good books and read the Bible a lot. In his teenage years he worked hard on the farm, and read in his spare time, still incredibly poor. In his 20’s and halfway through his 30’s he was hugely in debt and barely able to keep a roof over his head. Throughout this time however, he was hardworking, honest (he paid back all his debts instead of skipping town like a lot of people did in those days), and kept learning and growing as a person.
Lincoln also suffered numerous failures… not just little failures either. His failures were serious setbacks in life, the kind that take the wind out of most people’s souls. In 1848, at the age of 40 he ran for reelection to Congress and lost. (This was at a time when 40 years old was close to the average life expectancy!) Having lost, Lincoln somewhat disappeared from politics for the next 5 years. Was he just wasting time? —Absolutely not! Lincoln intentionally worked on improving his mind, studying Shakespeare, Geometry and even working through his own ideas until he had all of them thoroughly thought through. All of this hard work eventually paid off as Lincoln entered onto the national scene as president and won the Civil War—possibly the greatest challenge our nation has ever faced.
There’s quite a few things here to ponder. For starters, it seems that there was a long season of preparation in Lincoln’s life. The world wasn’t ready for his internal greatness to be manifested outwardly until the final few chapters of his life. But I believe it was this inward greatness that enabled him to be part of something that changed the world. He was among the first of the then revolutionary Republican party. At the time, they were the only major party willing to stand up to slavery. (The Democrats wanted to keep slavery going, and the now defunct Whig Party refused to take a stand on the issue). Likewise, he doggedly slogged his way to victory in the American Civil War, fighting popular opinion, Congressional disagreements, political rivals and incompetent generals.
And I don’t really think you can say he got the job done (the job in this case, being a life of greatness) with much panache. It was a little bit sloppy, but he kept improving his whole life through, refused to quit on himself or his beliefs, and remained faithful to what he was called to do. His reward for all his work, of course, was not stored up for him in this life. He only enjoyed a few days of peace after the South had surrendered before he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in the Ford Theatre. It’s astonishing to think of the price he paid, and to realize that what he did is something a selfish person could never, ever accomplish.
But Heaven has rewards for those who miss out in this life, and the history books remember him, as so does the grateful nation he left behind.
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