TR, on leaving the Dark House

It is hard not to like Teddy Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States. As a boy he was sickly, but he compensated for this by living a very active life — and advocated that others live a strenuous life as well. Becoming President did not mean that he ceased his athletic exertions.

In fact now, now he was in a position to make others participate in his athletic hobbies. Roosevelt seemed to especially enjoy torturing French ambassador Jules Jusserand. One day, Jusserand came to the White House to play tennis with Roosevelt. They played two sets of tennis, and then Teddy suggested they go jogging. They jogged around the White House lawn for while, and then they had a workout with a medicine ball. When they were through with their medicine ball workout, Roosevelt asked his guest what he would like to do next. The exhausted diplomat sighed, “If it’s just the same with you, Mr. President, I’d like to lie down and die.”

Roosevelt, like Lincoln before him, was an indulgent father while President. One day a friend came to visit him in the White House and while the two of them were speaking Alice, the President’s daughter, kept coming into the office and disrupting them. The friend finally asked if there wasn’t something that TR could do to control Alice. TR replied, “I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”

While he may have been a man of action, Roosevelt was by no means shallow. In fact, he had a keen insight into the nature of man. Once, in a letter to the poet Edwin A. Robinson, TR wrote:

There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us; he who has never failed has not been tempted; but the man who does in the end conquer, who does painfully retrace the steps of his slipping, why he shows that he has been tried in the fire and not found wanting. It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts…

This is good theology. All of us have a past to be ashamed of. Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6.9-12)

Some of the Corinthian Christians had been caught up in these very sins. But the glorious message of the New Testament is that we do not have to stay in the Dark House of sin. We don’t have to remain sexually immoral, or idolatrous, or drunkards. Jesus came that we might be washed, sanctified and justified. Jesus came to break us out of the Dark House.

(Sources: Paul Boller, Presidential Anecdotes, 194-195, 206; John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt, p. 161; English Standard Version of the Bible.)