Mere Life

In 1962 research scientists Victor and Mildred Goertzel published the provocative and revealing Cradles of Eminence. Its purpose was to study 413 “famous and exceptionally gifted people” and learn what produced such lives. The patterns which emerged from the very beginning of the study were startling. For example, approximately eighty percent of the later famous children loathed school. Seven out of ten eminent persons came from homes which in no way could be considered warm or peaceful. Rather they were homes riddled with traumas such as missing or argumentative parents, poverty, and physical handicaps. Almost every conceivable handicap had been successfully overcome by some eminent person. The book provided some revealing insights into the roots of people who were later to be called “great.” Virtually all of them had overcome severe difficulties in order to become the people they were called to be.

Perhaps God gives us difficulties in order to give us the opportunity to know who we really are and who we really can be. We live in a world that is sometimes constipated by its own superficiality. But life’s difficulties are even a privilege, in that they allow us or force us to break through the superficiality to the deeper life within.
~Tim Hansel