The key to success: Fight!
One universal truth of life that I have seen over and over again is that we progress from struggles to victory along the path of the same choice: Do I give up or fight?
Marriage in trouble? Then your choice is to give up or fight (as in fight to make the marriage work). Job getting too tough? Then you have the choice to give up and find another job, or fight to overcome the difficulties in the current one. With each decision to fight we grow stronger and learn to take on more. Each decision to fight is a decision to move toward a triumphant life. Sure there are time when one must step aside and take a breath, but it's way too easy to make that a frequent habit, leaving one with little progress.
The most successful people are those that learn to fight, who learn to accept problems as opportunities.
Last year a family we know faced losing their home to a fire. Now the entire family, mother, father and eight children are homeless, having lost virtually all of their possessions. Their lives were spared only by God's providence. They were having a family picnic in their pasture when an explosion ripped through their house. They watched in shock as their house was reduced to a pile of ash. All their belongings, treasures, memories, photos, keep sakes--gone. I spoke with them weeks later, and they are as chipper as always. They are dealing with the problems and getting on with their lives. They'll be inconvenienced for a while, but they know that with hard work, they can rebuild what they've lost. They're fighters.
That same week I also got news that someone I know was getting a divorce. With few exceptions divorce is defeat. It is the surrender to the difficulties of a marriage and an abandonment of the commitment marriage stands for. It's giving up. It's retreat. It's not moving on, it's turning back. Happy marriages come from working through difficulties and letting that work built a better relationship. Nothing of great value comes easy. Walking away gives an illusion of solving a problem, but it merely postpones it. We move on only when we learn to overcome the problems and maintain those things that are worth the fight. That's why a greater percent of second marriages fail than first marriages, because the illusion of divorce as a solution becomes even easier to fall for. If it was worth starting, it's worth keeping, but the false idea that walking away from a marriage, is too easy a choice for people to accept and so they miss out on the wonders of a marriage that has withstood the fires of difficulty.
And that brings us to the real topic--our commitment to Iraq.
We started the war out of self interest--ridding the world of a madman with weapons of mass destruction. Even though more than enough weapons of mass destruction have been found, the Leftist-controlled media maintains the lie that none were. Even though Saddam Hussein murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, the Leftist-controlled media now ignores that and artificially inflates the death toll from the war. And it's because of that support for America and Iraq's enemies offered by our Leftist-controlled media that that enemy has been so encouraged to maintain the fight.
What we are being asked to do right now, by that same Leftist-controlled media is to cut and run, to give up, to surrender. Even after the surge they dismissed as useless has proven its effectiveness, they still want to pull out and leave the Iraqi people at the mercy of the same insane zealots that killed almost 3,000 people on 9/11.
But surrender isn't a solution, it's merely a postponement of the problem. We will face those who abuse Islam to rationalize violence, either now or later, but we will face them. We can take care of them now while they're still weak, or retreat, give them a chance to regroup, re-arm and come after us from who knows where with who knows what.
Fighting to finish the job is a difficult decision, but it's the wisest.
Posted by Danny Carlton at April 14, 2008 8:22 AM