A French proverb says that “little by little, the bird builds its nest.”
In the 1830s, the noted writer Thomas Carlyle learned this truth in a dramatic way. He had embarked on a multiyear effort to write a massive literary work on the French Revolution. Upon finishing the first volume, he gave the manuscript to his friend John Stuart Mill to read. Mill’s servant, however, mistaking the pages for trash, used the manuscript to start a fire. When Carlyle learned of this blunder, he was devastated. Years of hard work had literally gone up in flames! How would he ever rewrite it?
Legend has it that one day, Carlyle saw a mason building a wall, carefully laying one brick at a time. Carlyle took new courage. He could rewrite his book, the same way he wrote it the first time—one page at a time.
Like Thomas Carlyle’s book, life is a monumental, long-term work. Just about everything good in life is built little by little, brick by brick—with patience and persistence. Success, happiness, contentment, and strong relationships don’t happen overnight. They take time: time to make things right, time to mend and heal, time to learn and improve.
It’s comforting to note that the great God of Heaven is a God of patience and longsuffering. If He can be patient with us, we would do well to be patient with ourselves.
So we stay with it, day after day, and do our best to carry on. Whether it’s writing a book, planting a garden, overcoming a weakness, or building a friendship, we keep at it. Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Persistence and patience will not make problems go away, but as we’ve all witnessed and experienced, they can give us the power and the hope to face our problems.
Perhaps we could all take a lesson from Thomas Carlyle, from the bricklayer, and from the bird, all of whom accomplished great things “little by little.”
-Lloyd D. Newell
October 29, 2017
Broadcast Number 4,598
Mormon Tabernacle Choir
Conductor
Ryan Murphy
Organist
Richard Elliott
Host
Lloyd Newell
Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven
Ryan Murphy
My Shepherd Will Supply My Need
American folk hymn; arr. Mack Wilberg
Improvisation on “How Firm a Foundation”
J. Ellis; setting by Richard Elliott
The Battle of Jericho
Spiritual; arr. Moses Hogan
Climb Ev’ry Mountain, from The Sound of Music
Richard Rodgers; arr. Arthur Harris
Come, Labor On
T. Tertius Noble; arr. Ryan Murphy