July 31 | Moments Almanac | Costly

Welcome to Moments Almanac for today, July 31st, and this day really holds two moments about ambition and what can happen when a life once aimed at glory is surrendered to something greater. The first belongs to the Basque nobleman named Inigo. He was thirty years old, vain about his appearance, proud of his swordsmanship and hungry for the honors of court and battlefield. In the spring of 1521, he was defending the fortress at Pamplona against the French when a cannonball tore through his legs, shattering one and badly wounding the other. He survived, but the recovery was brutal. When the bone healed badly, surgeons broke it again to reset it, and when an unsightly piece of bone still protruded beneath the skin, he insisted that it be cut away, not because it threatened his health, but because it ruined the shape of his fine boots and stockings worn by a gentleman in the court. Even flat on his back, half dead, his vanity had not yet finished with him. Months of convalescence followed. He asked for the romantic tales of knights in battle that he loved, but there were none in the house. Instead, someone brought him a life of Christ and a collection of stories about the saints. He read them because there was nothing else to read. But somewhere in the boredom, something shifted, ando noticed that his dreams of military glory thrilled him for a moment and then left him empty. The lives of those who abandoned everything for Christ stirred something deeper, something that remained after the daydream ended. He began to wonder whether courage might mean more than winning battles, and whether greatness might be found not in making a name, but in surrendering one. When he recovered, he traveled to the monastery at Mansurat, laid his sword before the altar, exchanged his nobleman's clothes for the garments of a pilgrim, and began a different life. He would eventually become known as Ignatius of Loyola. He helped establish the Society of Jesus, a company of disciplined missionaries, teachers, and servants prepared to go wherever they were sent. Ignatius died in Rome on July 31st, 1556, a man who had once counted rank, appearance, and reputation as everything, and had learned to count them as very little beside the call of God. Two hundred and twenty-one years later, on that same date, a nineteen-year-old Frenchman signed his name to a different kind of surrender. Gilbert de Montier, the Marquis de Lafayette, was a wealthy young nobleman married into one of France's most powerful families with every reason to remain safely at home and let the American Revolution be someone else's trouble. His government forbade him to leave. He purchased a ship anyway and sailed across the Atlantic, determined to serve a cause that was not even his own country's to fight. When he reached Philadelphia, Congress had become weary of foreign adventurers arriving with impressive and demanding high-ranking commands. Lafayette offered something different. He asked to serve without pay. He would finance himself and begin without the authority he believed he deserved. He wanted only the opportunity to prove that his commitment was real. On July 31st, 1777, Congress commissioned the 19-year-old Lafayette as a major general in the Continental Army. The young nobleman who could have spent his fortune protecting his comfort began spending it instead on a revolution. Neither Ignatius nor Lafayette began as a man emptied of ambition. Ignatius wanted glory on the battlefield. Lafayette crossed the ocean partly because he wanted glory in a war he had chosen for himself. Their motives were complicated because human motives usually are, but both men discovered that the life we plan to build for ourselves is sometimes interrupted by a life worth giving away. Paul understood this interruption. He had once built his identity from ancestry, achievement, education, reputation, and religious accomplishment. Then he met Christ and wrote, Whatever gain I had I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. He went further still, saying everything he had once trusted now he regarded as rubbish compared with the surpassing worth of knowing Christ, Jesus my Lord. That's not a comfortable exchange. We spend years assembling the person we want the world to admire. We polish our resumes, we protect the image, we gather titles, we carefully defend the future we have imagined for ourselves. And then Grace asks a dangerous question. Would you be willing to lay it all down? Not because ambition is always evil, not because achievement has no value, but because there are things greater than being noticed, promoted, praised, and remembered. Ignatius left a sword on the altar. Lafayette crossed the ocean without a salary, and both remind us that life becomes truly great, not when it gathers everything to itself, but when it finally discovers something worthy of being spent upon. And that's scattered moments for July 31st. I hope you'll join me for the first day of August tomorrow morning. Until then, take heart. Notice the scattered moments and share the grace.