When it comes to overcoming adversity, there are many stories of great men and women who have found meaning and joy through suffering.
About 20 years ago, a family friend passed along a book – Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century, by David Aikman, former senior foreign correspondent for Time Magazine. The tagline reads, “True stories of virtue to delight the mind and stir the spirit.”
My kind of book.
On the inside jacket, Aikman writes, “What has struck me as a reporter for most of my adult life is the capacity of individual human beings again and again to rise above their times and their circumstances and to change, if only just a little, the direction of the human tide.”
In the book, Aikman tells the stories of six remarkable individuals – Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, Elie Wiesel, and Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn.
I would like to talk about Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn today.