The pages of our nation’s history are filled with stories of great people who faced conditions of depravation, financial ruin, severe sorrow and suffering—even death—yet pressed on for the greater good of the country.
Martha Washington had such strength of character.
In the winter of 1778 she arrived at Valley Forge to a rabble of desperate soldiers wrapped in thin blankets, starving, freezing, and disheartened. She organized the wives of officers to feed, clothe, nourish, encourage, and pray with the soldiers.
This was not her first or last foray to the battlefield. Throughout the Revolutionary War, she would join her husband, General George Washington, for winter encampments from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, where she continued to strengthen and encourage this unlikely, rag-tag army that went on to defeat the greatest military force in the world. They called this diminutive, five-foot, soft-spoken heroine “Lady Washington.” Years later, as she faced the unrelenting demands of public life, she wrote to a friend, “I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have . . . learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.”¹
This was wise counsel for those early patriots, and it is wise counsel for us today.
Hardship and heartbreak may surround us, but our circumstances must not steer our hearts or still our hopes. Each of us has dominion over our dispositions. We shape our happiness with determination and inner resolve, with our grace and goodwill, our sensitivity and humor, and our capacity to put one foot in front of the other and boldly carry on.
Program #4042
¹Letter to Mercy Otis Warren, in “Martha Dandridge Custis Washington,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/firstladies/text/mw1.html.