Day 13 of 21 Days of Courage

2 Corinthians 4:17
“For our present troubles are small and won't last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever!”
 

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I have never been what you would call proficient at the ancient and honorable game of chess, but I am fascinated by it all the same. I’m amazed at the skill and intellect required to see not only your next move, but your opponent’s next move, and the next five or six moves after that. It boggles my mind.

One of the things I especially love about chess is the role of the pawns, those pieces lined up in the front row—cannon fodder for the fast-moving rooks, knights, and bishops. Because they can only move one space at a time and only in the forward direction, many players think of pawns as weak and valueless; they can be sacrificed with no great consequence. But some players, I’ve heard, jealously protect their pawns. They guard them carefully, saving them for the later stages of the game.

Why? Because if you can keep a pawn alive long enough to get it to the opponent’s back row, the lowly pawn can be transformed into a queen, the most potent piece on the board.

To me, that is the essence of courageously navigating the difficulties of life. When the going gets hard and you feel like a pawn, shuffling slowly from space to space, that’s the time to hang in there! For all you know, you may be almost to the finish line. You may be just about to get your promotion, your spot in the limelight.

And it is a fact that, to God, you are not a pawn. You are made in His image, born to be an agent of His unfolding design for the world. Even when things look dark and you are questioning all your most basic assumptions, there is a divine spark in you that nothing can quench. God has invested you with meaning, with a purpose that nothing can take away.

Viktor Frankl was a neurologist and psychiatrist who practiced in Vienna, Austria, until 1942, when he and his family were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto by the Nazis. Subsequently, Frankl was transferred to Dachau while his wife Tilly was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she died.

Frankl endured the horror of the death camps, treating patients when he could. He spent five months as a slave laborer.  Somehow, he managed to survive until his camp was liberated by the Allies in 1945.

After the horror of the camps, Frankl pondered the meaning of his experiences. The ultimate outcome of his thinking would be captured in his profoundly influential book, Man’s Search for Meaning, published in 1959. Frankl concluded that even under the cruelest conditions, life can still have meaning.

Even suffering, he reasoned, can be an achievement
if it is endured in the right way.

He relates a story of a forced march on a bitterly cold morning. The prisoner marching beside him commented, “I hope our wives are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.” Frankl was suddenly captivated by the thought of his wife—his love for her and hers for him, the way she used to look at him, her kindness and understanding. He writes:

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. . . For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

I believe Viktor Frankl was onto something. What he discovered on that frigid morning, in the midst of the most hopeless situation imaginable, is that even the worst times do not define the meaning of our lives. A loving God, who longs to walk with us and know us, has placed into us a portion of His own nature. And that—not our circumstances—is what defines us and sets us apart. That is what enables us to follow our dreams, even if we have to walk in the dark.

You were made to shine like a diamond. When you endure the difficulties with courage and emerge on the other side, you will find that the experience has polished you to a harder, more durable glow. As you persist through the challenges, you will discover a bit more of the eternal spark placed in you by God.

-Pete