Author: Michael Catt

Originally Published in the Charlotte Observer, 7/20/1930 As an article in the Havner’s Reflections column- copyright Friends of Vance Havner

If you are going to be an uplifter, a preacher or reformer, it will pay you to study life as it is and not as books picture it to be. Most messages fail to get across because the speaker does not know life; he has studied in some cloistered spot life as some other recluse thought it ought to be and then has gone forth into the world as it is utterly out of touch with reality.
Sometimes when I listen to some polished professional weaving airy theories before a comfortable audience in snug pews I feel like crying out, “Brother, what do you know about it? Brought up in pleasant environs, trained in your conventional course, then turned out a finished product into a standardized system, do you really know life as it is? Have you ever been down amid the dirt and sweat and grease, the heartache and hunger, the grief and misery of raw and naked reality? Do you know folks as they are, not as books and plays and talkies picture them? Have you ever felt the pulse of humanity, its thrills and tragedies, its sunlight and shadows, its broken dreams and its beautiful longings, its sordidness and sweetness, its filth and fineness-have you ever listened to the heartbeat of the race as most of it actually is?”
The finest writers, preachers, artists are not always those who had most thorough technical training. Indeed, some were pitifully lacking there. Those who best have expressed the heart of humanity are those who have got down into the middle of life with both feet, rubbed elbows with folks as they are, witnessed the complex shadows of experience, the comedy and tragedy of life. They can speak the heart of humanity because they have shared its emotions.
If you wish to be a preacher, it is perhaps well to study theology. It is better to know life. You cannot sit in a cozy corner and do that. Work in a rescue mission awhile. God incognito into the great cities and rub elbows with all classes. Get out on the open road and study people from life. Learn their hopes and fears, their dreams and problems, what God and life and happiness mean to them. You can be in Rome without doing as Rome. One need not drink swill to understand hogs and you do not have to share the vices of men to understand their viewpoint. But get right out into things as they be; you will be angered, shocked, amused, saddened, gladdened; you will be amazed at the virtues of the vicious and the vices of the virtuous. And you will come back to your pulpit with an understanding heart which is better than a smart head.
And you will be following exactly in the steps of the Master, the friend of publicans and sinners. He was no pale recluse in some sheltered nook inventing fair theories of life that would not work. He mixed with the mob, the raw, genuine hash of humanity. He dined with them, walked with them, shared their simple joys and helped them in their sorrows. He liked them because they were exactly what they were and did not hide their failings behind the robes of superficial piety. The only set He could not endure was that Pharassic clan who thought they had religion sewed up in a bag with exclusive control of the puckering string. And He once boldly told them, “The publicans and harlots go into the Kingdom before you!”
What do you know about life? Think over it, brother.
VANCE HAVNER

(Originally published in the Charlotte Observer, 7/6/1930) Copyright Friends of Vance Havner

We have a peculiar notion that those few notables who happen to crash into the limelight are the great of earth while the rest of us are the misfits with a complex or a loose screw somewhere. We measure success by the degree to which a man accumulates property, rises in office or gets himself written up in the news.
As a matter of fact, this farce we call success is a tricky thing not dependent entirely upon human merit. There are plenty of people as funny as Will Rogers, as poetic as Edgar Stanley Jones who pass out quite unknown. The difference is not in merit and what keeps them from reaching the reputation others no better than they attained is beyond their power to affect.
There is a tremendous element of what one might call pure luck in success. Some people happen to run into a happy combination that made them famous overnight or put them in line for the front page while others work a lifetime and never strike such a “break.” William J. Bryan, I believe, attributed part of his fame to luck and any sensible man knows the part it plays. One man happens to fit into a series of developments which he did not create, a set of converging events that throw him up into fame while another man, as good or better, plugs along unknown.
Mind you, this does not mean we must not have the merit too. One must be fit to meet the big chance when it comes and if a man is unprepared all the lucky breaks in the world cannot help him. But, for all that, we must recognize the “breaks” which may be only a slang term for Providence.
So we need not berate ourselves because we miss the Hall of Fame. It is not necessarily a reflection upon us. Part of the game is not in our hands and we are here to play well so far as the field is ours, let results be what they may.
We have magnified too much the goal, the reward, the laurels and the ballyhoo. We have made that the big thing and being fit and laying well have been advocated because they lead to the big job and the front page. But exactly the opposite is true. Being fit and playing well the game is the main thing; the results, the rewards, are purely incidental.
In religion, we have often made heaven, the reward of the righteous hereafter, the main attraction. We have been good because it pays. Our eyes have been glued to the goal and all else has been secondary to pay-day. But to be good is the main thing; all else is incidental.
Let us get the is matter of right living in its proper perspective. The sole business of the Christian is to live the good life. All external matters, what happens to him, whether he becomes rich or poor, has good luck or bad, is famous or obscure, all these are not for him to bother about. The one concern for him is to live each day up to the best light he has and let developments care for themselves.
Those who so live are the truly great. The famous and prosperous are not the only great; they do not exhaust the list. For greatness is not measured by external fortune and circumstances. Those things do not enter into it. The really great comprise some of both rich and poor, fortunate and unfortunate; famous and unknown.
The great are those who live well each day regardless of what happens.
VANCE HAVNER