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"But whatever it is, that idol must first be CRUSHED,
SMASHED -- it must be literally torn out of your mind, even though
it hurts more than having all your teeth pulled out and perhaps a
jawbone, too! I don't believe that many people experience this
painlessly. I don't know of any anesthetic that will render it
pleasurable. Usually it seems like something more excruciating
than the agony of death by the cruelest torture.
"Now I had an idol. My whole mind and heart was set on that
idol. I had worked hard, night and day, for that false god. My
false objective was the intense desire -- the desperate, driving,
overpowering ambition -- to become 'successful' in the eyes of
important business men -- to be considered by them as outstandingly
'IMPORTANT' -- to achieve status. I did not have a love for money
as such.
"After establishing my publishers' representative business
in Chicago, I aspired someday to own, or build, one of the finest
and largest homes in the north-shore aristocratic suburb of
Winnetka -- with large spacious grounds constituting an important-
appearing estate. I wanted to be considered important by the
important.
"I was so zealously set on that accomplishment that it
became the god I worshipped and served.
"God could not use me as long as I had another 'god' that
was more important in my eyes than He. Yet tearing that ambition
out of me was like yanking out, root and branch, my very life
itself. It was smashing dead everything I felt I lived for, and
worked for.
"So God first took away my business in Chicago by
bankrupting every major client. Twice, later, He again swept
businesses that promised multi-million dollar rewards right out
from under my feet. He brought me down to poverty and to hunger.
"By hard work, driving myself, using resourcefulness,
personality, persuasion, by fierce determination, I had built,
while still only 28 years old, an income equal to $60,000 per year
on today's dollar valuation.
"The biggest corporation in the publishing field at that
time, the Curtis Publishing Company (Saturday Evening Post and
Ladies Home Journal) had made a survey among Chicago advertising
agencies to find the liveliest, most aggressive and promising young
advertising man in the city. I was offered the job -- but smugly
turned it down! I was bigger, in my own estimation, than any man,
anywhere.
"But the bigger they come, the saying is, the harder they
fall! And all this swelled-up EGO came crashing down, down, DOWN!
I had been so big -- so important -- in my own sight, there was no
room left for God! But God whittled self-righteous Job down to
size! God drove strutting King Nebuchadnezzar out to eat grass
with the beasts! God struck down Saul with blindness, changed his
direction, and then his name to Paul. And God was certainly able