Trouble

Music has been one of my all-time favorite indulgences.  However, early on I knew I would never make it as a mainstream musician.  Moreover, I didn’t think I should float through life simply doing what I love to do.  So I put music mostly on the back burner when I entered college.  However, I got a little reprieve via enrolling in summer school following my junior year, so the first-semester of my senior year, I finally tried out for and was accepted into the regionally renowned Muskingum College A Cappella Choir. 

I didn’t realize what a benchmark experience that was going to be!  A passage in one of the choral selections kept coming back to haunt me, again and again, with these words:  “I do not regret me all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am.”  I knew I had a long and difficult road ahead as an aspiring biomedical scientist, so this passage became my mantra – my manifesto … that I would never shy from nor regret the trouble that might lie between me and my chosen mission.

REST OF THE STORY

Years passed  … five years … ten years … twenty five years.  The more time that passed, the more curious I became about the original context of this passage.  However, my LP recording had long since disappeared and the college could not locate copies of either the recording or the original music in the archives.  But the words simply wouldn’t go away: “I do not regret me all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am.”

Thirty seven years after graduation, during a period of voracious reading on foundational themes on the essence of life, I decided to tackle “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan. 

Imagine my surprise … delight … shock … and near synchronistic melt-down … to find the very passage I had been looking for and living with and without all those years – on the 4^th page from the very end of the book!  It was Bunyan’s “Mr. Valiant-for-Truth” who had been the source of this indomitable reflection all this time.  It’s actually much better than I remembered it: 

• “After this it was noised abroad that Mr. Valiant-for-Truth was taken with a summons …; When he understood it, he called his friends, and told them of it.  Then said he, ‘I am going [hence], and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am.  My sword and shield, I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.  My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought [the] battle.’”  

Here are four follow-up questions worth pondering: 

HOW MUCH TROUBLE HAVE YOU BEEN AT

TO ARRIVE WHERE YOU ARE?

:::

HOW MUCH DOES THAT MATTER?

:::

IS THERE ANY UNSPARED EFFORT THAT YOU REGRET?

:::

ARE YOU NOW WHERE YOU NEED TO BE?

*************************************

The perception of what’s “Trouble” and what’s merely part of the journey makes a huge difference.  Boys Town, Nebraska, a town established to care for abandoned boys, carries the motto: 

“He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” 

If you can find a Mission or Purpose or Identity big enough, the troubles involved in pursuing it will be insignificant. 

“It ain’t heavy, it’s who I AM and what I DO.” 

I trust that your Mission, Purpose and Identity are indelibly inscribed on some gleaming goal post atop a glowing horizon.  Be PASSIONATE about who you are and what you do!   And don’t “trouble yourself” more than necessary by failing to pursue it with everything you’ve got.  Quartermaster