The Strenuous Life

Now you'd say, whoa, that is a big word.

I use that word because in 1899, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech entitled The Strenuous Life.

He challenged his listeners to reject a life devoted merely to comfort and ease and instead embrace a life of effort, responsibility, and meaningful accomplishment.

Although Roosevelt was not delivering a biblical exposition, the principles provide an interesting parallel to the Christian life.

Nor are they the first to borrow from him.

Years ago, I called attention to the debt incurred with characteristic forgetfulness of obligation by the late Theodore Roosevelt in The Strenuous Life and elsewhere.

Roosevelt, a typical apologist for the existing order, adeptly dragging a herring across the trail whenever it was menaced, yet managed to delude the native boobery, at least until toward the end, into accepting him as a fiery exponent of pure democracy.

Perhaps he even fooled himself.

Theodore Roosevelt later gave that ideal its most famous political form.

After building his public identity around ranching, hunting, and hardship in Dakota Territory, he urged Americans in his eighteen ninety-nine speech, The Strenuous Life, to reject ignoble ease.

Mitchell offered private therapy, and Roosevelt offered a national creed, but both answered the same fear: that comfort, wealth, and sedentary learning were making Eastern men soft.

For Philadelphians, that strenuous ideal was more than an abstraction.

Theodore Roosevelt later gave that ideal its most famous political form.

After building his public identity around ranching, hunting, and hardship in Dakota Territory, he urged Americans in his 1899 speech, The Strenuous Life, to reject ignoble ease.

Mitchell offered private therapy, and Roosevelt offered a national creed, but both answered the same fear, that comfort, wealth, and sedentary learning were making Eastern men

soft.

He was somebody that found a lot of purpose, right, in a new challenge, and there was nothing more challenging than what he undertook in this scenario.

And it's actually in this, in this period of his life that he begins to develop what will be his life philosophy, which is the strenuous life.

And he talks about that a lot.

You'll find in the writings of Theodore Roosevelt that i- in his mind, it is in the facing of challenges that a person becomes great, that you're not supposed to run away from what is difficult.

He launched America into becoming a world power, and I think about if he were here, what he would say to us.

I think what, the advice that he would give us is that it's not the easy life.

It is the strenuous life that makes a difference, and all we have to do is be willing to dare and to do great deeds, to challenge ourselves.

And so my invitation to the audience would be think of what is most terrifying to you.