I was really inspired by the story told by Dr. Schuller based on his personal experience and I ought to share this with you. Kindly take time to read and I swear it's worth reading.
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It was a harsh summer, the summer of ’82. For many, it was as if the clocks had rolled back to the thirties and the time of the Great Depression. Company upon company declared bankruptcy. Unemployment soared. The ‘sever and prolonged recession,’ as it was dubbed by the media, sent ripples of depression across America.
Politicians used the depressed state of the country to their advantage. It provided a great opportunity to highlight the failures, shortcomings, and faults of the opposite political party. Democrats found in it an opportunity to blame the Republican administration which was in charge. Predictably, the Republicans, in turn, blamed the “democratic administration that created the problem” which the Republicans had inherited.
Everybody was fixing the blame—nobody was fixing the problem!
The problem persisted. They grew. The recession ran rampant across the country until nearly everyone was affected by it. No one was immune.
I, personally, felt it as pastor of the Crystal Cathedral congregation and head of a national television ministry, which was broadcast on 169 television stations every week. With five hundred people on the payroll, we were operating on a budget of well over twenty million dollars a year. The cost of operations continued to increase dramatically. Like the rest of America, we too were faced with tough economic times.
No one could deny that the country had problems. But the biggest problem we had was our attitude toward the economic problem. Negative thinking spread like a plague through all levels of society. It was not easy to protect oneself from the infection of negative thinking, which spread by word of mouth, by conversations with friends as well as strangers, by television screens, and by radio news reports.
It spread quickly because in recessive times the tendency is to react negatively. Once and organism, a business, a life, or a country is infected with negative thinking, the infection attacks the mind, the heart, and the soul like termites that secretly gnaw away at the emotional support system.
It was in the midst of this national mood that I arrived at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago. I was there to present a motivational lecture at a major convention.
Delivering lectures of inspiration as well as on successful management principles was nothing new to me. Each year I travel from coast to coast, giving nearly one hundred talks to doctors, executives. Educators, you name it.
However, I was particularly fascinated by this engagement. My audience would be members of the Ag-Industry. (“Ag” is, of course, the abbreviation for agriculture.) This industry represents those who are involved in the farming enterprises of the Midwest states of Iowa, Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota. Having been born and reared on and Iowa farm, I looked upon this as an opportunity to touch base with some of the people that came from the same soil I left forty years before.
My anticipation of a warm, inspirational evening was quickly doused by a couple of somber-looking gentlemen. The convention badges pinned to their dark lapels identified them as the men for whom I was looking. They greeted me with restrained enthusiasm. “Dr. Schuller? Thank you for coming.”
Their words reminded me of the thousands of times I have arrived at some scene of tragedy. In hospitals, mortuaries, courtrooms, and cemeteries, I have heard those words: “Thank you for coming.” I couldn’t help feeling that I had arrived at the scene of some tragedy, rather than at a motivational convention.
The younger man spoke: “There are thirty-five hundred people in there waiting to hear you speak.”
His companion interrupted. “These people are going through tough times. They don’t want to hear your funny stories. They don’t want to see you grinning from ear to ear like you do on television. They don’t want a pat on the back with a hollow promise that ‘Everything is going to be okay.’”
At that point, both men moved shoulder to shoulder to face me as if they meant to block me from entering the platform. The first man spoke up, “That’s right, Dr. Schuller. These people are losing their farms. Their businesses are going bankrupt. Terrible pressures are being placed on their marriages and families. They need help. And more than anything else they need hope. Give it to them.”
With that admonishment they nodded to the sound man, who pinned the microphone to my suit. As he did, I heard through the thin wall that separated the backstage area from the speaker’s platform, the master of ceremonies’ introduction: “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure now to introduce our keynote speaker. His name is Dr. Robert Schuller. He is the pastor of the world-famous Crystal Cathedral. This beautiful building was built at a cost of over twenty million dollars and was dedicated virtually debt-free. No minister or priest or rabbi speaks to more people every week in the world or in the United States of America than does Dr. Robert Schuller from Garden Grove, California. It’s our pleasure now to welcome one of the world’s most successful men—Dr. Robert Schuller. Let’s give him a great welcome!”
The sound of enthusiastic applause surrounded me as I stepped onstage to face this collection of depressed souls. Thirty-five hundred people were on their feet, applauding me. The grand ballroom was packed to capacity.
Inwardly I shuddered. My carefully planned speech had just gone out the window. The three jokes I was prepared to tell for my own pleasure and for the purpose of “warming up my audience” now seemed out of place.
I found myself walking across the stage without the faintest idea of what I would tell these troubled people. I paced myself quietly from one end of the platform to the other, trying to collect my thoughts. I searched the eyes of the audience. I recalled the words of the stern welcoming committee. I decided to recover my position by asking a question.
“They tell me that you are having tough times. Is that right?’
The question gave me time to embrace a dramatic pause. Such a pause can be a lifesaver to a public speaker.
I continued to pace back and forth, pretending to exude the confidence of a well-prepared lecturer.
I could tell that my opening question had grabbed their attention—probably more effectively than the three funny stories I had carefully placed in my front pocket.
From that point on I delivered a spontaneous lecture that at times erupted with new insights. Wanting desperately to help these people and give them hope, I decided to address myself specifically to the pressing problems of these men and women who represented an industry vital to the health and welfare of our country. They represented the core of the breadbasket of America. The food in the markets and on the tables of our country comes from the labor and the leadership of these agriculture businessmen and women.
I remembered years ago what I was taught in my undergraduate studies in public speaking, lecturing, debating, and oratorical work in Hope College, Holland, Michigan, and again in my training at Western Theological Seminary in preparation for delivering sermons and talks from pulpits: the most effective speech is not a sermon but a witness. Essentially the principle is this: If you don’t have any advice to give, you can always share your own story.
If there has been any excitement, challenge, crises, and resolution in your life, then share it! Everybody likes a good story.
Drawing on this principle, I decided to share with the farmers how I handled the tough times in my life.
I suspected that my audience was not aware of the fact that I, too, had tough times. My introduction portrayed me only as a very successful man, senior minister, founder and builder of a twenty-million-dollar, internationally acclaimed work of art called the Crystal Cathedral. They could only perceive me as very successful. They had not been told that I, too, had walked a path similar to the one they were now walking.
Should I tell them about the time a twenty-below-zero blizzard raged through the lonely blackness of an Iowa night? Should I tell them how the wind whistled around the fragile country house, successfully penetrating the cracks between the window frame in the northwest corner of my bedroom, leaving fresh drifts of snow on the floor beside my bed? Should I tell them how we didn’t have the money to buy coal to warm the house? Should I tell them how we raced to escape with our lives from a tornado? Should I tell them how we survived the great drought, when the shortage of natural rainfall parched the earth and proved more devastating and destructive than the shortage of cash flow that had already hit all of the Americans in the Great Depression? Should I tell them about my struggles to get through college? Should I tell them about the fire in my rooming house in which I lost the few possessions I had? Should I tell them how I had to struggle to start a church with only five hundred dollars, in a strange state without friends, contacts, property, or community support?
Should I tell them about my wife’s bout with cancer? The near-loss of my daughter’s life in a motorcycle accident? The amputation of her leg? Should I share with them our struggles of the past three years, as we have tried to help her accommodate effectively to life as a young teen-ager with a disfigured, left stump of a leg? Should I tell them how I was forced by circumstances beyond my control to build the Crystal Cathedral when I didn’t want to build it, didn’t have the money, and knew well enough that I would be criticized for building a “monument”?
I decided not to pour out my whole life story. But I did decide to begin with the realities of the tough times I had been through and how they had been handled successfully through a faith based on possibility thinking.
“Farming life has never been easy. My boyhood farm was a typical Midwestern farm. That meant it was small. The industry was not simple crop farming. The crops were harvested and fed to livestock. Chickens laid the eggs, which was traded for groceries. Cows grazed the grassland along the river that was too difficult to plow. We milked the cows and sold the milk. When the hogs reached their prime weight, they were sold at market. It was a one-crop-a-year farm. That meant that we planted the oats and the corn in the spring time and harvest it in the fall, to be gathered into barns and saved for feed for the hogs. The winter season was merely a time of survival—waiting and hoping for spring.”
My father purchased our farm when prices were at their peak. Real estate had been climbing steadily. I was born only a few years layer, September16, 1926.
How my father saved enough to buy our farm is a story in itself. Because he lost his parents as a teen-ager, Dad was forced to drop out of school in the sixth grade and to find the only job he could—as a hired hand for the local farmers. One could always husk corn: Rip each single golden ear from its nest of leaves, crack off the six-foot stem, and throw it into the wagon. My father was a thrifty young man and was able to save a few nickels and dimes that he earned for each ear of corn he picked.
Finally he had saved enough to purchase a 160-acre farm. Unfortunately he bought it at the top of the price cycle. When I was three years old the Great Depression hit. Real estate prices plummeted along with the stocks. While internationally famed corporate chiefs were committing suicide in Wall Street, lonely farmers—America’s original small businessmen—were clinging with broken fingernails to the earth, hoping to survive.
My father was one of those tough, tenacious farmers. Winter was the worst. I shall never forget the times when we did not have money to buy coal. The trees that surrounded the house were considered precious living creatures that could not be sacrificed for fuel. So we never considered cutting them down and sawing them up for the wood-burning stove.
Instead it became my job, as a child, to step over the three-foot high splintered wooden fence and climb into the jog yard among the one hundred squirming, squealing hogs. With and empty basket I maneuvered my way through the excrement, picking up every corncob left after the hogs had consumed the kernels.
Not a single cab was left uncollected. Every single one was considered of real value. When the basket was filled, I would carefully carry it to the tiny two-story, white sideboard home where my mother, father, brother, and sisters lived. The corncobs would fuel the stove in the kitchen. They would also be used in the potbelly stove in the little living room. These were the only two sources of heat in the house. Little grills in the ceilings allowed some of the heat to pass from the downstairs kitchen and living room to the upstairs bedrooms. But cracks in the walls let in just as much freezing air.
“Do you want to hear about my experience with poverty?” I said to the struggling thirty-five hundred businessmen, seated in the carpeted ballroom of the plush Hilton Hotel. “Let me tell you about poverty. I was so poor we had to use corncobs to heat our homes to keep from freezing to death in the subzero winters. We used corncobs because we could not afford coal.”
“Those were tough times!” I bellowed.
Then I recalled the years of the great drought. Even as the economic depression ravaged the country, the Iowa farmers fought a far tougher battle. For reasons we never understood, the normal spring rainfall never came to moisten the newly planted corn and oats. The few precious dollars that my father was able to save had to be spent on seed corn.
I always wondered how he dared to risk throwing seed in the ground where it might rot and die, when he could safely bring it to town and convert it to cash. “Why take a chance?” I once asked my father. “Why don’t you play it safe and sell it?”
“People who never take a chance,” he taught me wisely, “never get ahead.”
Of course, there is no success without the application of the multiplication principle. It was a natural, native, basic principle that every farmer understood. So in the springs of 1931, 1932, and 1933 my father took all that he had left—the last kernels of corn, the last cups of oats—and planted them in the ground of his small Iowa farm, expecting that the rains would fall.
He hoped that the seeds would become wet and bloated until they erupted with new life, sending their tender little sprouts up through the softened spring soil. Light-green rows of corn would begin to grow and stand out against the black background of the dark Iowa ground.
Rainfall is essential to a farmer’s success. And Iowa farmers can expect rain to fall at least once every other week.
If, for some reason, the rains did not fall for three or four weeks, one inch of the topsoil would dry out first. Then, if rain still did not come, the soil would gradually grow dry at two, three, four, five inches deep, until the hair-like tentacles of the roots of the new corn plants would die.
The first evidence of the death of the roots would be a wilted leaf.
When the rains did not fall for two weeks, my father was worried. When the third and fourth weeks passed with no rain I saw his face grow very grave. Not once did he become angry. Never did he miss praying with bowed head at the table before our morning, noon, or nighttime meals.
The only thing my father did about the drought was pray. That was the only thing he could do. Farmers gathered from miles around, at special prayer meetings, filling the little white churches that dotted the rolling landscapes. Out of respect and reverence to the almighty God, each farmer came, not in his overalls, but in his one and only suit and tie. They called upon God Almighty to save their land and their crops. They asked Him to send rain.
Then all they could do was to go home and wait for His answer. For a whole year the Lord was silent. Day after day, the sun bore down on the crops. Every day we thirstily scanned the scorching sky for a sign of a cloud. More than once I ran into the house, calling out, “I’ve seen a cloud! God may be answering our prayer!” But the clouds always dissipate.
Finally, as if in fact our prayers were being answered, there was a gathering of clouds. Hopes began to rise again. The desperately needed rainfall was moving in from the west! Flashed of lightning slashed through the black sky. Thunder cracked. The trees trembled with fright as the wind whipped through their branches. It rained!
I was jubilant, but my father did not share my enthusiasm. Neither did my mother. For they knew what I did not know: the rain was totally inadequate. When the last thunder clap echoed in the distance, signaling the passing of the storm, the sun came out bright and hot again. We walked outdoors. My father scooped up a handful of the wet, moistened surface soil. Only the top quarter-inch was wet and black. Below that the earth was powdery dry.
Then the winds began to blow—from where we did not know. The sky turned from bright blue to a drab gray to a dirty brown. And the clean bright air that I enjoyed breathing as a child suddenly became polluted with dust. “That’s South Dakota land you are breathing, Son,” my father said. South Dakota, the state that bordered Iowa on the northwest, was suffering a worse drought that Iowa. It did not even enjoy the sporadic showers that moistened the surface soil. The barren land, devoid of any vegetation, lay helpless before the gathering winds. They swept the feathery particles of earth high into the sky, carrying them hundreds of miles to the east. Like drifts of snow the dust settled on our farm. When the winds blew harder, the dust sandblasted the few rows of corn that had managed to survive the drought. The fragile young plants, wilted and weakened for want of refreshing water, were no match for the grit driven by the hot winds. There was total devastation. Here and there, like bones of a dead animal, dead corn stalks protruded above the drift of dry sand.
Still the winds did not cease. It became a common procedure for my brother, sisters, and me to cover our faces with wet clothes as we walked the short distance from our house to the outdoor toilet. When we walked to the well, where we hoped we would be able to pump water from the forty-foot reservoir, we would have to protect ourselves from the suffocating dust with our moistened masks.
Our water became more and more scarce as the meandering snake of a river dried up. The Floyd River had been my closest childhood friend. On its green banks, near open pastures, I would lie, watching the clouds change shape in the blue sky. It was there that I felt closest to my Creator.
I became incurably addicted to God’s natural green gardens. Years later, I would hope and dream of a place where I would worship and see the sky above me, day and night. Years later I would dream of a church that could allow all of the sky to permeate our troubled minds with its peace, bringing healing from worry and anxiety. Years later I would find that dream fulfilled in a Crystal Cathedral.
But during the summer of the great drought, I watched the river dry up. Little pools of water became mud holes where squirming bullhead catfish died. We were surrounded by death—the river was dead, the fish were dead, and most importantly, the crops were dead.
Summer finally gave way to fall. Newspapers nationwide proclaimed the Midwest farm belt to be in “total disaster.” Even the New York bankers and corporate chiefs became concerned about a plague that was as great, if not greater than their own economic depression. The breadbasket of America was in ruins.
If it had been a normal year, my father would have expected to harvest corn that would fill dozens of wagons. That year, my father harvested barely a half a wagon of corn, grown on a half-acre of ground. In a normal year, this swampy lot, fed by some mysterious underground spring, was too wet to produce any fruit at all.
My father had often thought about digging deep into that plot to drain the subsurface water away. Now in the year of the drought this small plot of ground was the only parcel out of 160 acres where the corn had survived. Here the corn lived, drawing moisture from a subterranean source. Here the corn grew nearly six feet tall. And here we harvested the minuscule crop.
It was but half a wagon of corn.
A total disaster? Not quite. For a half a wagon of corn was better than none at all. In fact, it was equal to the amount of seed that had been sowed earlier that year. A total loss? No. We gained nothing. But most importantly we lost nothing!
I shall never forget my father’s dinnertime prayer that night.
“Dear Lord. I thank You that I have lost nothing this year. You have given me my seed back. Thank You!”
Not all farmers had as much faith as my father did.
“For sale” sign began to appear on farm after farm. Discouraged farmers who could not imagine that things would get better packed up and abandoned their land. Other farmers simply threw their hands up in despair and allowed the bank to foreclose. More than one piece of property sold on the courthouse steps.
Years later I asked my father how he had survived. After all, he had had no cash reserves. He had had no rich relatives.
“I went to the bank,” my father said, “and I promised them that if they would help me, somehow I’d return their money. I pleaded with them to refinance, rearrange the mortgage, postpone the due date. For some reason, the bank believed in me and it helped.”
I remember that bank! I have early childhood memories of going there, in patched overalls, with my father. I recall seeing this slogan on a calendar in that bank: “Great people are ordinary people with extraordinary amounts of determination.”
I’m convinced that that slogan exemplified the positive attitude of my father and inspired the bankers to go along with him and give him an extension on his mortgage payment.
That slogan was an explanation of my father’s success and an inspiration to me to attempt the impossible too! For I had dreams of my own—to go to college and seminary.
Some years later, on a quiet June afternoon, the tornado struck. I had not unpacked my suitcases, having returned only a few days before for the summer recess from my college studies. Throughout the afternoon, my dad and I could hear an awesome roar reverberating like the hum of a mighty organ. The eerie sound was like many freight trains rumbling above the threatening and gathering clouds.
“Sounds like we’re in for a hailstorm,” my dad murmured.
In a desperate attempt to protect his prize roses, we rounded up empty pails and wooden boxes to cover every treasured bush. It was six o’clock now. We had finished our evening meal in haste. From the vantage point of our front lawn we could see more than a mile across the rolling farm land. The sun was lost now, seemingly swallowed by the black monstrous storm that was prowling the western sky.
Slowly, with alarming stillness like a tiger crawling up on a sleeping prey, the storm crept closer. Gusts of hot wind blew the dry dust of the country road. The old box elder bent before the mounting winds.
Out in the pasture a cow bellowed frantically, calling her little calf to come to her side for safety.
My riding horse seemed to sense impending disaster. He cut a commanding picture, standing erect, with head held high, graceful neck arched. His tail, lifted slightly, fanned in the wind; his ears searched the air for sounds of danger.
Suddenly a black lump, about the size of the sun, bulged out of the black sky. In an instant it telescoped to the ground in a long gray funnel. For a moment it hung suspended—like a slithering serpent, about to strike death to helpless victims below. Dad called to Mom: “It’s a tornado, Jennie!”
I asked excitedly, “Are you sure it’s a real tornado, Dad?” My first emotion was delightful excitement. This would be something to tell the fellows when I returned to Hope College in the fall. The funnel seemed so small I couldn’t imagine the fury that could be unleashed from such a funny cloud.
“Call Mother, Son, and tell her to take whatever she can grab and come to the car. We’ve got to get out of here—right away!”
A moment later we were driving crazily down the road. We lived on the east end of a dead-end and had to drive a mile west, directly into the path of the oncoming tornado in order to reach a side road that led south, away from the path of the storm. We made it.
Two miles south, we parked our car on the crest of the hill and watched the wicked twister spend its killing power. As quickly and quietly as it had dropped, it lifted and disappear. It was all over. The storm was gone. The air was deathly still, but the danger was past. Gentle raindrops now began to fall. The tail end of the dark sky dropped a soothing shower of cool rain, as if heaven were pouring a soothing balm on fresh wounds.
We could go home now. “Oh, God, will we find our house?” We reached the crossroads, only to find a long line of cars. Curious sightseers, sensing that something terrible had happened, already were gathering. They were looking at the complete destruction of a neighboring farm.
Wondering if our house had been spared, we drove down the lonely road, crisscrossed by wires from broken telephone poles, toward our secluded farm. We came to the base of the hill that hid the view of our house. Before, we had been able to see the peak of our barn. But not now. We knew before we went over the hill that our barn was gone.
Now we were on the top of the hill. We saw it. Everything was gone. Where only a half hour before there had been nine buildings, freshly painted, now there were none. Where there had been life, there was the silence of death. It was all gone—all dead.
Only white foundations remain, lying on a clean patch of black ground. There was no debris. Everything had simply been sucked up and carried away. Three little pigs, still living, suckled the breasts of their dead mother, lying in the driveway. We could hear the sickening moan of dying cattle, the hiss of gas escaping from a portable tank of butane used to provide fuel for our stove. Then I saw my riding horse—lying dead with a fourteen-foot-long two-by-four piercing his belly.
Dazed, our brains reeling, we sat in our car. My father was past sixty and had worked hard for twenty-six years to try to win this farm. The mortgage was about due. This seemed to kill all chances of ever saving the place from the creditors. I looked at my dad, sitting horror-stricken, white-haired, underweight from overwork, his hands blue, desperately gripping the steering wheel.
Suddenly those calloused hands with their bulging blood vessels began hitting the steering wheel of the car, and Dad cried, “It’s all gone! Jennie! Jennie, it’s all gone! Twenty-six years, Jennie, and it’s all gone in ten minutes.”
Dad got out of the car, ordering us to wait, and walked with his cane around the clean-swept, tornado-vacuumed farmyard.
We later found out that our house had been dropped, in one smashed piece, a half-mile out in the pasture. We had had a little sign on the kitchen wall—a little molded plaster motto. Its simple verse was: “Keeping looking to Jesus.” My dad found and carried to the car the broken top half: “Keeping looking…” Well, this was God’s message to Dad—Keep looking! Keep looking!
Don’t quit now. Don’t sell out. Dig in and hold on. And he did! People thought my dad was finished, but he was not. He was not finished because he would not give up. He had faith with hanging-on power! There’s one ingredient that mountain-moving faith, miracle-generating faith, earth-shaking faith, problem-solving faith, and situation-changing faith must have, and that ingredient is holding power. So Dad didn’t quit.
Two weeks later we found in a nearby town an old house that was being torn down. A section of it was available for sale for fifty dollars. So we bought this remnant and took it apart, piece by piece. We saved every nail and every shingle. And from these pieces we built a new little house on the old home farm! One by one, additional farm buildings were built. Nine farms were demolished in that tornado but my father was the only farmer to rebuild a completely demolished farm. A few years later prices rose sharply. Farm products prospered. Within five years the mortgage was paid off. My father died a successful man!
“So you’re having tough times! Are they tougher times than my father experienced?” I looked deep into the eyes and the hearts of the new generation of Iowa farmers. “Are you burning corncobs for fuel? Have you lost everything in a tornado? Is the mortgage due and the cash not there? Are you tempted to walk away and put the place up for sale? Then let me tell you something about tough times. I believe I have walked the path and have earned the right to comment on tough times. Let me tell you something about tough times.
Tough times never last, but tough people do!
The place broke up with applause. Those thirty-five hundred farmers who had lost hope and had battled depression found that hope. They caught a new vision and began to dream again.
Are you facing tough times today? Overwhelmed? I invite you to take a walk with me. Let me tell you about survivors—and how you can be one too! In the process your life will become a light for someone else’s pathway.
The path is called “The Possibility Thinking Path.” I’ve been preaching it for years. It has never let me down. It has never let anybody down. IT never quits on us. We may quit the path, but the path keeps right on going on to happiness, health and prosperity.
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