The First Virtue of Manhood: Tough Love
Tough as Nails
Behold, their brave men cry in the streets.
—Isaiah 33:7 NASB
May 20, 1927
Roosevelt Field, Long Island
At 7:52 a.m., a twenty-five-year-old pilot named Charles Lindbergh fired up his single-seat, single-engine airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh almost ran out of runway before takeoff, but no brakes meant no turning back! Thirty-three hours, thirty minutes, and thirty seconds later, Lindbergh touched down in an airfield outside Paris, becoming the first person to make a solo nonstop transatlantic flight.
Half a dozen pilots before him had failed, buried at sea. And Lindbergh’s flying résumé paled in comparison to theirs. He was a mail pilot with a handful of barnstorming events under his belt. But what he lacked in experience, he more than made up for with mental toughness.
Lindbergh had no radio and no fuel gauge. He also got next to no sleep the night before! Because of weight limitations, Lindbergh hardly packed anything, not even a toothbrush. He only took one quart of water and five ham and chicken sandwiches. He ate only one of them.
Through the darkness of a moonless night, Lindbergh aimed at Europe. He flew as high as ten thousand feet and as low as ten feet, fighting thousands of miles of fog over the Atlantic Ocean. Lindbergh got the first hint that land was nearby when he saw a fishing boat as morning dawned on the second day. He closed the throttle and circled the boat, yelling, “Which way is Ireland?” The poor fisherman either didn’t speak English or was too spooked to answer.1
As the sun set for the second time in his epic journey, the lights of Le Bourget paved the way to Paris. He circled the Eiffel Tower, then flew toward what he thought would be an empty airfield. He found the airfield all right, but it wasn’t empty. Instead, a huge crowd crying, “Vive!” gave Lindbergh a hero’s welcome. Lindbergh won not only the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris, but he also won the hearts of people around the world.
The day after his flight, newspapers ran 250,000 stories totaling thirty-six million words. One publication called it “the greatest event since the resurrection.” Lindbergh received so much fan mail—3.5 million letters—that thirty-eight Western Union employees were assigned to manage his mail.
So how did Lindbergh do it? How did he succeed in doing something so many others had failed to do? How did he endure the fog, the fear, the fatigue?
Here’s my theory.
During the darkest hours of the night, I bet Charles Lindbergh thought of his grandfather, August Lindbergh.
In 1859, August Lindbergh immigrated to America from Sweden and found work at a sawmill in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Two years later, Lindbergh fell into a whirring saw blade that tore through his upper torso. It left such a gaping hole that one eyewitness said they could see his beating heart.2
A half-conscious Lindbergh was carried home, where he waited three days for a doctor! When the doctor finally reached Lindbergh, he amputated what was left of his arm and sewed up the hole. Now, here’s the amazing thing: August Lindbergh didn’t scream or cry. Not even an “ouch!” He toughed it out, suffering in silence.3
With a grandfather like that, is it any wonder Charles crossed the Atlantic? Compared to all the pain and agony that his grandfather endured, a solo flight across the Atlantic was a cakewalk.
Toughen Up
Next time someone complains a little too much about their aches and pains, tell them about August Lindbergh. I actually tried this with my youngest son, Josiah, when he was twelve years old. He might have been a tad too young for that gory story, but it worked like a charm. He quit complaining!
Reality check: most of our problems are first-world problems.
My wife, Lora, recently spent several days in a Syrian refugee camp on the border of Greece and Macedonia. The horrors that many of those refugees have endured is unconscionable—homes destroyed by bombs, families torn apart by civil war, children drowned at sea trying to escape. We have Syrian refugee friends who recently immigrated to the United States who actually buried their sixteen-year-old son alive for nine hours to protect him from being forcibly recruited to join ISIS. That will put your problems into perspective in a hurry.
The refugees can’t go back home to Syria because their houses are destroyed, and they can’t go forward because of a barbed-wire fence at the border. It’s not unlike the situation the Israelite refugees found themselves in after the exodus—trapped between an uncrossable Red Sea and a stampeding Egyptian army.
That’s a tough spot.
We, however, get frustrated when we miss a connecting flight or can’t hook up to the internet. Really? We get upset over a thirty-minute delay before boarding a 450-ton Boeing 747 that will soar to thirty thousand feet in the air and get us wherever we want to go at half the speed of sound. We need to keep checking our perspective.
Sometimes we need to lighten up.
Sometimes we need to toughen up.
I’m not advocating wholesale stoicism. I am advocating a single virtue—toughness. It comes in lots of shapes and sizes, from physical toughness to mental toughness. I want to focus on the rarest form of toughness—tough love. That’s the first virtue of manhood.
Tough love is far more difficult to attain than physical toughness, and far more important. It sets the men apart from the boys! A tough guy isn’t someone who can blacken an eye or bloody a nose; it’s someone who is willing to be nailed to a cross for someone they love.
Playing the man is tough love!
Baker Books
May 2017
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