Fruitful Frustrations

FRUITFUL FRUSTRATIONS

Rev. Clyde B. Smith

Whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will come unto you. --- Romans 15:24

PAUL WANTED TO GO TO SPAIN; he had his heart set on that. In his dream of Christian conquest he had laid his plans for reaching the outermost rim of the world, to preach there the good news of Christ. But he never got there. Instead, he got a prison cell in Rome.

His experience has something to say to ours: somewhere along the road we all have to deal with disappointment, with disrupted plans and deferred hopes and unrealized dreams. Every man’s life is a diary in which he means to write one story, and is forced to write another.

We have been talking about desire as the driving force of life, stressing the point that the Christian answer is not the elimination but the dedication and fulfillment of it. Christ came not to reduce life but to fulfill it, that we might have it more abundantly. Now let us think of the frustration of desire, and the Christian answer to that.

Here is Paul, whose earnest Christian desire was not fulfilled, but frustrated by the exigencies of life itself. He wanted Spain, and got a prison. Anyone unprepared for such a joust with disappointment is not conditioned for life.

 I have read somewhere that the increase of suicides, alcoholics and even some forms of nervous break-downs is evidence that many people are training for success when they should be training for failure. For failure, you see, is far more common to man than success; poverty is more prevalent than wealth, and disappointment is more normal than arrival. Few people have a chance to live on the basis of their choice. A large majority of us have to settle for something less than what we want, and for many that is a major problem of life—to take a broken plan, a disappointment, a frustration, and make something out of it. So, if we are not prepared for anything but success, if we have no philosophy for failure, we are not ready to face the most normal issues of life. “Whensoever I take my journey into Spain . . .” He never took that journey. Instead he journeyed to Rome, and there he sits in prison, scribbling on a bit of parchment.

I think we had better stay with Christ a little longer. The world has many philosophies, but no one answers back to this tragic element in life so persuasively and redemptively as Jesus. A Hindu proverb says, “He that is born in the fire will not fade in the sun.” Christianity was born in the fires of failure and defeat; its symbol is a cross on which its Founder took the worst in the world and made it an instrument of redemption. And part of the many meanings of this cross and this faith lies in its teaching that all our frustrations, even the worst the world knows, may be made fruitful.

Suppose we begin on the lowest level, where the truth is so obvious that we cannot possibly mistake it—at the point where everyone has learned, to some extent, how to make frustration fruitful by getting traction out of trouble. No one but a fool would pretend to understand the mystery of pain, and no one but a liar would pretend to enjoy it, but certainly this is clear: that without pain there would be no progress, and without frustration no traction for our feet.

All life makes progress in a resisting medium. The bird needs the resistance of the air to fly; the fish needs the resistance of the water to get traction for his fins, and even the simple business of standing on our feet could not be accomplished without frustration—without resisting forces pushing against that action.

There was an old grandfather clock which had stood in the corner for three generations, faithfully ticking off the minutes, hours and days. Its motion came from a heavy weight, suspended by a double chain. “Too bad,” thought its owner, “that such an old clock should have to bear so great a load.” So he released the weight and took it out, and at once the ticking stopped. “Why did you do that?” asked the clock, “I wanted to lighten your burden.” “Please,” said the clock, “put my weight back. That is what keeps me going!”

Exactly! Life’s troubles are so disagreeable, the weight of them so heavy that we never give them credit for their help. I am sure that most of us, looking back, would admit that whatever we have achieved in character we have achieved through conflict; it has come to us through powers hidden in action by the challenge of opposition and frustration. The weights of life keep us going.

The cults of comfort are in error; and they have no worthy answer to trouble when they tell us to dodge it by metaphysical gymnastics, or to think it away. They want a world that is all pleasure and no pain. These light, easy answers are based on the false assumption that the goal of life is happiness, peace of mind, and comfort. It isn’t.

Holiness, not happiness, is the goal of life. So, when God molds a man, He puts weights on him, gives him burdens to lift, crosses to carry, hardships to endure, tribulations over which to triumph. All is a profound mystery, to be sure. 

A little boy wanted to know why vitamins are always put in spinach and never in ice cream, where they should be. Don’t ask me why, but for some strange reason our sweetest songs come out of our saddest thoughts; the Negro spirituals are the sad songs of a sad race, and they are the loveliest music in America! Arnold Toynbee, the historian, traced it through history in his monumental study. In a chapter entitled “The Stimulus of Blows,” he shows how hardy civilization has come to birth in response to challenge: “The greater the challenge, the greater the stimulus.” Without weights, even civilization cannot keep going. A little boy was leading his sister up a mountain path. “Why,” she complained, “it’s not a path at all. It’s all rocky and bumpy.” “Sure,” he said, “the bumps are what you climb on.”

Or think of another area where frustrations can be made fruitful, somewhat by accident: that area in which we find the capacity to get beauty out of blunder. Life is full of accidental frustrations, as though blind fate were in control, spinning the wheel of fortune and calling our name on the off-numbers. “Bad breaks,” we call them—the things that happen through no fault of our own. Many people go through life broken by the bad breaks. They invest a fortune and the bottom falls out; they take up a life task and their health fails; they want marriage and find the door closed by some family responsibility which they cannot disregard. Longfellow tells of a man whom nature designed for a poet but Destiny made a schoolteacher. This life is queer and incalculable, filled with risks and but few dreams turning out as we had planned.

Yet it is amazing how fruitful the bad breaks can be with the help of a little resilience and resourcefulness. Where accidents end and providence begins is an open question. A boy in Decatur, Illinois, was deeply interested in photography. He answered an ad in a magazine and sent in his twenty-five cents for a book that told all about photography. The publishers, however, made a mistake; instead of sending the book he had ordered they sent him “A Manual on Magic, Mind-reading and Ventriloquism.” The section on ventriloquism fascinated the young Swedish lad, and he began practicing the art of “throwing his voice.” You have heard of him. He created a wooden dummy to speak with, at one time, more people listened on Sunday night than to all the preachers on the continent. Whether the blunder that made Charlie McCarthy or his abilities is classed as providential will depend somewhat on your point of view, but it does illustrate the element of accident on which life so often turns.

In 1915, Coffee County, Alabama, was an almost starving community; in the heart of the cotton belt, it had been invaded by the boll weevil, which stripped the cotton of its leaves and stole a people’s livelihood. Just when it seemed hopeless, they began listening to the counsel of a Negro scientist named George Washington Carver, who told them to turn from cotton to peanuts. In the lowly peanut he had found unbelievable riches—chemicals for soap, ink, paper, plastics, shampoo, and I do not know how many other sources of wealth. So, in 1919, the people of Coffee County, now on their way to becoming a prosperous community, erected a memorial on which was inscribed: “In profound appreciation of the boll weevil, and of what it has done as the herald of prosperity, this monument is erected by the citizens of Enterprise, Coffee County, Alabama.” Failures are not fatal, nor are frustrations final. Most of us have some sort of boll weevil to be thankful for—some calamity, or what seemed to be a calamity, that turned to something more fruitful.

Someone has said, “Resourceful men never make mistakes; their failures are always the portals of new discoveries.” Hosea said the same thing centuries before, when he spoke of the Valley of Achor, the fearful valley which, because the thief Achan was buried there, became the synonym of despair and disgrace. Hosea calls it (in Moffatt’s translation of the Bible) “the dale of trouble.” Through Hosea the Lord promised His people, “I will make the dale of trouble a door of hope.”

You need only to turn to biography to see how “dales of trouble” have become doors to success, and how failures have been turned into fortunes. Edison started out selling newspapers on a Western railroad, and was fired from his job because he spilled acid in the baggage-car and set it afire. That accident turned him to telegraphy and scientific research. What a fruitful blunder that was! Abraham Lincoln tried to reach the heights as a lawyer, and failed; at forty-six he considered himself the consummate failure of his time, and almost by coincidence turned in the direction that led him straight into the White House. John Wesley wanted to be a missionary, came to Georgia to convert the Indians, failed miserably, and went back to England a defeated man; but out of that frustration he found salvation, and out of his failure was born the Methodist Church! Whistler, the artist, wanted to be a soldier, but failed in his chemical examination at West Point. He often chuckled over that: “If silicon had been a gas,” he said, “I would have been a major general.” When Victor Hugo was forty-eight years old he was banished by the French emperor and for twenty years lived in exile on the island of Guernsey. There, in loneliness of soul, he wrote Toilers of the Sea, Les Misérables, and several other of the major works which made him famous. He was bitter at the time of his banishment, but looking back on it later he said, “I should have been banished earlier.” 

Just where does accident end and providence begin? Who knows?

So. if you miss Spain and get a prison, however that may disappoint you, it does not necessarily mean the end of everything. It may be the beginning of something. Even a spell of sickness can be a door; it may be a providential moment when God makes you lonely to hear the quiet voice, or puts you on your back so you have to look up.

Here Is the New Testament; fourteen letters of Paul make up the bulk of it. (Most of the New Testament, you know, was written in jail!) Some of the very best of it might not be here at all if Paul had gone to Spain. Shall we not say, then, that God was in that disappointment, giving Paul a prison cell from which to pour out words of immortal hope and faith? After twenty years of incessant missionary wanderings, Paul at last was quiet enough in that cell to penetrate deeply into the mystery of Christ. He made out of that frustration some of the greatest contributions of his life!

Now, lest it seem that we have been dealing altogether too lightly with this tragic element in life, let us move into the deeper shadows, to where a cross is hung. Some of life’s frustrations can be made fruitful only by a dauntless spiritual quality in the soul, an undiscourageable capacity to snatch dividends from defeat. Not all our failures, accidental or providential, turn into good fortune; some of them we have to live with, endlessly. Not all our valleys become doors of hope. Not all our prisons open out on centuries; some of them are dark and dreary places, their great walls shutting in the spirit and leaving it to beat in vain against the bars. What then? To live on with a broken body, a broken heart, a broken home, when the frustration settles down into a continuing problem—what then? Then we must go deeper than magazine success-stories, deeper than surface philosophies, into the profound underlying meaning of the cross.

Tolstoy, in his book, My Confessions, describes four ways in which people face tragedy, disappointment and defeat. First, there are those who are frightened by the strange turn of events and simply go out and get drunk. Second, there are those who give way to complete despair, and remove themselves from the problem by suicide. Third, there are those who resent it and stoically steel themselves against it and harden their hearts against it. And, fourth, there are those (among whom he classifies himself) who irrationally accept it, yet stand up to it bravely and take life as it comes. Is that the best we can do with the tragic elements of life? Just grin and bear it? Stand up and take it? Courageously endure it? Walt Whitman wrote a hymn in praise of the defeated, of the people who did not conquer, who fought bravely on and fell in the fray, and went down with all but their courage overthrown.

Let us grant that there is something admirable and wonderful in facing life bravely. But does it not leave out the one creative, redemptive element which runs all through the New Testament, and of which the cross of Christ is the supreme symbol and illustration? Jesus did not merely endure the cross; he used it. He didn’t merely bear the blows life hurled at Him; He took them and turned them and made them weapons against evil. The frustrations of the cross He made the salvation of the world. He took the fierce winds that beat against Him and made them a force to lift men to the feet of God. 

The Christian answer Is that adversity should be made to pay dividends, to put richness into life that wasn’t there before. Under Christ, adversity is transformed into the status of a servant of spiritual achievement. “Out of the eater came forth meat,” said Samson, after his battle with the lion. Which meant, as he later expounded his riddle, that bees had hived in the carcass of the lion he had slain, and produced honey. Getting honey out of adversity—that is the inner secret of the cross.

Christianity says we should get something out of everything, even out of defeat. We ought to get something out of sickness, and not just go through it. We ought to get something out of criticism, and not just “take it.” We ought to make every disappointment, every broken hope, every severed relationship, pay a profit. Socrates once advised a young man, “By all means get married. If you get a good wife you will be happy; if you get a bad one, you will become a philosopher.” You should get something out of everything, even out of defeat. If you have missed your Spain and gained a prison, the creative Christian question for you to ask is, not “How can I bear this thing?” but “How can I use it?” While you may never get out of it, you can, if you wish and try, get something out of it to make the story of the cross a success story and leave it there, no matter how you try. But there it stands, the symbol of victory over the worse the world can do.

Thornton Wilder has a three-minute drama based on the Gospel story of the pool of Bethesda. The chief character is a doctor who is himself sick with a wound he cannot heal. Along with the other sick people around the pool, he stands waiting for the moving of the waters that he may get in first and be made whole. But the angel stands there, saying, “Draw back, physician; healing is not for thee. Without your wound, where would your power be? It is your very sorrow that puts kindness in your face and makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The angels themselves cannot heal the wretched as one human being broken on the wheel of life. In love’s service, only the wounded can serve.” So, in disappointment, the doctor turns away to live with his wound, never to be cured. But even as he turns, a man comes running to him. “Come home with me, sir, if for only an hour. My son is lost in dark thoughts, no one understands him, and only you have ever lifted his mood. My daughter, since her child died, sits in the shadow. She will not listen to us. Only you, who are wounded, can help her.”

Perhaps you, too, have to “live with it”—with that cross, whatever it is. Perhaps there will come no miracle to make it easy, no angel to help you out of it. But because you belong with the wounded, the people who sit in shadow-land will turn to you for that intangible something that puts hope into life.

High up in the north of Scotland there is a hunting lodge which has become a famous show place. One day, many years ago, a guest opened a bottle of soda and splashed its contents over the newly decorated wall. The other guests hoped it would dry and disappear, but it didn’t; it left a long unsightly splotch, stretching almost from floor to ceiling. The guests went away feeling that the scolding of their host was justified. But one man remained behind. He studied the blotch on the wall; then he went to work on it with crayons and charcoal and, finally, oil paints. With quick, bold strokes he turned the brown stains into brown Highland rocks, with a cataract pouring over them. Where the stain was deepest he painted a glorious Highland stag leaping into the torrent, pursued by hunters in the background. His name? Sir Edwin Landseer, the artist famous for his paintings of animals. By his thoughtful and considerate action he brought good out of evil and beauty out of ugliness. Ever since then, every artist passing through the town has stopped to study Landseer’s picture, and on the walls of the lodge many have added drawings of their own, until now it is no longer just a lodge for careless guests, but an abiding place of beauty for those who love beauty.

Thank God for our great Gospel of Redemption that can take our blunders, our failures, even our deliberate sins, and weave them into a pattern of beauty and make even our frustrations fruitful; even our losses victories.

 (In reverse order)