The Deceitfulness of Biographies

This week I started reading a biography of David Livingstone, the famous missionary to deepest darkest Africa. It’s a small, short book that has gotten me thinking about something that is for the most part unrelated to Mr. Livingstone’s missionary service.

I am amused by the methods of biographical writing. Mr. Livingstone worked for many years in a factory for 14 hours a day and then at night stole time to read. It was grueling work. After years of almost clandestine study, he went to a different city and was accepted in missionary school with a medical focus. However, he was initially rejected because of his poor ability to deliver a sermon. What is the bulk of the story that covers this time in his life? A few anecdotes about people who told him he was wonderful - one supervisor at the factory who commended him on his book reading, a couple of faculty members who recognized his determinism at the mission school, and his parents, who encouraged him throughout. These stories are given almost as a premonition, a hidden message that “this will be a great man.� They remind me of tales of Abraham Lincoln, “from log cabin to white house,� and as you study him in his log cabin as a child, you almost giggle with the omniscience of a reader, thinking “I know what this man is going to turn into!� But this is not how life works, my friend.

Livingstone was laughed at for reading, mocked by his peers, and commanded by his father not to study science. He got little sleep for years and years and years because he worked so hard. He was apparently nothing much to look at and hence was disliked by girls, even blatantly rejected by one. He couldn’t preach a decent sermon, and during his delivery examination, he completely blanked out and fled from the pulpit right out the door. To top it off, then he was rejected as a missionary, not even being given the alternative of going to Africa as a carpenter to assist an accepted one. This was not a cake life. Livingstone was not thinking, “Oh look, these are my seeds of greatness. If I can just endure this, I will become a great and well known servant of the Lord.� In fact, he was probably miserable!

Rarely does anyone striving to be great become great and those whom we refer to as great people simply did what was set before them. Greatness is not something to be worked towards, so we shouldn’t be waiting and noting little foreshadowings of it in our lives as if we were living in a biography. What we should do is act like those we read about most likely acted while their biographies were being lived. They persevered, they did what was right, they sought to help people, they endured trial and temptation, they accepted rejection and failure as a part of life and kept going, they worked hard, they sweated – they took up their cross and followed Him. These are the great things in life. Just read the fine print in biographies.