Coincidentally At Fault

Robert Todd Lincoln was at the White House when he heard what had happened to his father at Ford Theater. He immediately rushed to be by his side and stayed there till his death. After the death of his father, he would go on to be a very successful lawyer and an important figure in Republican politics. Yet He eventually refused to have to do with the presidency.

He felt it was too dangerous.

It wasn’t just at his father’s deathbed he saw what an assassin’s bullet could do. He was standing right next to James Garfield when a gunman fired the bullet that would eventually kill him. Then as he was waiting outside for William McKinley when he was shot. From then on he refused to go anywhere near a president. He said "No, I'm not going, and they'd better not ask me, because there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.

It was just a coincidence but the tragedy still weighed on Robert Lincoln. He isn’t the only one. Many folks get weighed down thinking they are responsible for things that they really don’t have much control of. Things like other's behavior or choices. We think if we would have done this or that maybe things would be different.

We can influence others. We can teach others. We can be examples. But we can’t control them. We have enough to be responsible for in managing our own lives that we don’t need to take on everyone else's as well.

Let’s be careful to not blame ourselves or others for actions that they have no control over. God only judges a man for his own actions, shouldn’t we as well?

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

The Other Peter Principle

Simon wasn’t very good at his job. For most folks, fishing is a hobby a good time on the lake even if you get skunked. Not so for the professional fisherman. A day without a catch means no product to sell, no money collected, and nothing to bring home to the wife and kids. Those days seemed to happen a lot to Simon. Maybe I’m wrong but all I can go by is the history we have on him and every time we have it recorded, he caught nothing, at least on his own. You would have to be hard headed to keep at it with all that failure. No wonder he got the nickname of rock. So perhaps, that’s why when he got the chance at a new career he jumped at it. Well, not so much a new career but a different form of the old one. He would still be fishing just going after a different kind of fish. This time he would have a boss, one that had shown him, even in his old job, a better way to do things. And that made all the difference. Simon didn’t al...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog