Life's Setbacks

Jude 1:21 (NIV)

Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.

Thomas Carlyle's greatest work was undoubtedly his two volumes on the French Revolution. The work is a masterpiece.

In 1835, Carlyle loaned, in the original manuscript form, the second volume of his French Revolution to his friend John Stuart Mill to read and to criticize. Mill, in turn, loaned it to another friend to read. This friend thoughtlessly left the precious manuscript on a table where a servant, cleaning the room, threw it into the fireplace.

Carlyle was hurled into despair when he learned that all his hard labor had vanished into smoke and ashes. For days he sat in his room in London in incarnate gloom unwilling to see or talk with anyone. He seemed incapable of any further literary effort.

But one day, from his pessimistic slump, he looked across the acres of London roofs. There he saw a mason building a wall with painful patience, laying brick upon brick. Carlyle's father was a mason and what astonished Carlyle was that in all this slow monotonous work the mason was singing as happy as a lark. Here was a man happy and persistent in humdrum work that brought no public applause. The man's perseverance gave Carlyle a new perspective and he rewrote the destroyed volume and had it published two years later.

Don't let life's setbacks deter you from remaining in God's love.

Dear Lord, we give our disappointments and setbacks to You. We pray that You would give us the strength to seek and remain in Your love. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.