Sometimes we are reading things and hearing things and don’t get the meaning, the full meaning. Maybe it happens even quite often.
It happened to me long ago in Germany, and when I say long ago, I mean long ago. The above translated into German is: “Mut verloren, alles verloren.” If I remember correctly it is part of a poem or rhyme, I had to learn from memory while going to school. The summary of that poem is that you can lose the “lot,” but if you lose your courage, you have lost everything, really everything.
I am actually glad that the poem is still on my mind.
Now, recently I came across: “You can tell how big a person is by what it takes to discourage him.” Those words were not long ago such a blessing to me, that I repeated them again and again and I can say them now from memory. In fact I got so excited about them that I mentioned them to others.
And they are a blessing now.
They were a blessing this morning, when I waited for someone to come home, so that I could go out. When I waited and waited, I was thinking: “You can tell how big a person is by what it takes to discourage him.”
“Mut verloren, alles verloren,” (“Courage lost, everything lost.”) I am learning more and more what that means, or have a grasped the full meaning already?
Do you know what? “You can tell how big a person is by what it takes to discourage him, fits every situation.
“COURAGE LOST, EVERYTHING LOST.”