Seven Men!!

 

One of the things we like to do on long road trips is listen to books, and on our last trip to Michigan we listened to Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness by Eric Metaxas. Metaxas told each man’s story in about 25 pages in the print book, and let me tell you, this was way more than a history lesson, though it certainly was that as well.

I’m one of those people who hear or read words and immediately see them – the scene in my mind, and Metaxas made that easy.  I saw George Washington step off the pages leading his men through bloody Indian battles and he was hardly twenty years old. I watched him rise through the ranks, return home to Virginia in an attempt to lead a quiet life.  But this man of God, and you have to read the book, or listen to it, to understand his testimony, followed God’s leading to become our nation’s president, after doing about everything he could to avoid the spotlight.  Eric Lidell was a Scotsman, a missionary kid, and you may think you know all about him if you watched Chariots of Fire, but you only know part of the story.  And you probably think you know all about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian hung by the Germans days before the end of World War II.

Metaxas includes Wilbur Wilberforce, Pope John Paul II, Jackie Robinson and Charles Colson in his book, but let me tell you, when you finish reading their stories, the rest of their stories, you will understand why.

None of these men sought honor or recognition or power or greatness.  But they had a number of character traits in common: integrity, honor, faith, love of God and a sacrificial spirit.  That is, they loved God, communed with Him daily, and sought to do His will regardless of their personal cost.

As I listened to the book, I began to wonder if there are such great men and women today – people who hold on to things and recognition lightly, but who also hold tightly to their faith in God – going wherever and doing whatever they believed God directed.

Funny about that, my husband had ordered a copy of the lives of David and Ruth Seymour, colleagues of ours during our missionary years in Africa, and I think I found another Twentieth Century great couple of God.  Dave was a missionary kid whose father died while Dave was a boy. Subsequent to his father’s death, his mother returned to Africa leaving Dave and his sister in an orphanage because she could not care for them in Africa.  You might think that embittered Dave, but it didn’t.  He understood.  He served in the Navy during World War II, coming home to go to medical school, marrying Ruth after she graduated from nursing school.

Now Dave was a handsome man, a doctor, and the world lay at his feet.  But he and Ruth headed to the real heart of Africa where he not only provided medical care but trained Chadians to become what we might today call Physician’s Assistants, young men who headed up their own bush dispensaries saving the most critically ill or those needed surgery until his monthly visits.

Dave and Ruth had electricity only when the generator was on to provide power for surgeries in the hospital.  They lived off whatever was available – I remember we ate spinach in April (lots of ways) and corn in August and rice year round.  The point is the Seymours cared not for the riches this world had to offer, but lived only to serve God out of their giftedness. Were they perfect?  As none of the men in the book were perfect.  But Dave and Ruth, Washington and Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer and Lidell, and the others, all showed us that God can do amazing things through a yielded spirit. 

So read the book, buy it for the young men and women in your lives, or just consider, what you could do to bring honor to God.  It’s been two weeks since we listened to the book but I just cannot get it out of my mind.  Let me know what you think of it.