Greatness

Make no effort to be a titan. I was trained in a fundamentalist Baptist environment that had a very bad habit of exalting "great men" -- Baptist fundamentalists, principally. Tonight, I began a biography of John Calvin, who is undoubtedly among the greatest formulators of Christian Europe, when there used to be a Christian Europe But I as yet see no evidence that Calvin strove to be a great man. He was slight of frame, sickly of health, nervous of psyche, and peevish of temperament. He became a "great man of the faith" in spite of himself. Most Christian work is carried on by men and women of mediocre talent, who will never be widely known, and who are forgotten after their deaths by all but those who loved them, and God, who loves them most of all. But they do good in their lifetimes, and from their number, sometimes, for His own secret reasons, God turns a few of them into world-changers of varying scopes. Let us not make ourselves heartsick from a long-deferred hope of titanic ambition.