When You Don't Make Divorce An Option

Jill Briscoe, author, speaker, and pastor's wife, writes that one of the things her parents did right was to maintain their commitment to each other without ever considering divorce as an option.  She writes, "My sister and I knew that Mom and Dad enjoyed being married, would stay married, and hoped we'd do the same.  Differences they had were kept between them and worked out in the context of the promises they made to each other and to God on their wedding day.  There was no option out!  As someone has said, when the doors on a marriage are shut and bolted and a fire breaks out, all your time and energy goes to putting out the flames."

- Jill Briscoe, "A Foundation for Faith," What My Parents Did Right, comp. and ed. Gloria Gaither (StarSong Publishing Group, 1991)

The Extent Of Marriage

Sinclair Lewis once received a letter from a very young and very pretty woman who wished to become his secretary.  She said she could type, file, and anything else, and concluded, "When I say anything, I mean anything."  Lewis turned the letter over to his wife, Dorothy Thompson.  She wrote to the young woman saying, "Mr. Lewis already has an excellent secretary who can type and file.  I do everything else, and when I say everything, I mean everything."

- Alan Loy McGinnis, The Power of Optimism (HarperTorch, 1994)

Being Versus Doing President

In the spring of 1970, when I was twenty-nine, I learned I had won a fellowship from the American Council on Education, which would allow me to serve an administrative internship with Purdue University President Fred Hovde for the 1970 – 71 academic year. I was elated by the opportunity. Despite having only recently been awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor of electrical engineering at Purdue, I was already leaning toward a career in administration. . . .

Soon after the award was announced, I happened to bump into a colleague, Vern Newhouse, who was a highly respected senior member of the electrical engineering faculty. “So, Sample,” Newhouse said to me, “I see you’ve won some sort of administrative fellowship in the president’s office.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I said.

“And you’ll be learning how to become an administrator?”

“I suppose so.”

“And then you’ll probably want to be president of a university somewhere down the road?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess I’ve thought about it now and then,” I said, somewhat disingenuously.

He smiled and said, “Personally, I’ve never had any ambition whatsoever to be an administrator. I am totally inept at managing things. . . . But I’ve been a careful observer of ambitious men all my life. And here, for what it’s worth, is what I’ve learned: many men want to be president, but very few want to do president.” And with that he wished me well and walked away.

 — Steve Sample, The Contrarian’s Guide 
to Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2002)