Beginning Again in Uncertain Times

Years ago, as a student in seminary, I read a story the late Unity minister Eric Butterworth loved to tell about Thomas Edison and his son, Charles. In 1914, a fire broke out at the Edison Industries complex in New Jersey, destroying much of Edison’s life work. Charles searched frantically for his father and eventually found him gazing into the fire, illuminated by the glow of the flames.

“My heart ached for him,” Charles later wrote. “He was no longer a young man, and everything was being destroyed.” And yet instead of collapsing, Edison turned to him and said, “Charles, run and get your mother. She will never see anything as beautiful as this fire as long as she lives.”

Beautiful? His entire world was going up in smoke. But Edison saw something else. Possibility. Purification. A clearing. “There is great value in disaster,” he told his son the next day. “All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start again.”

I didn’t fully understand that story until many years later, when a major illness left me unable to work for an extended time. At the lowest point of that period—when the combination of medical bills, rent, and uncertainty had drained every reserve—I found myself in a grocery store trying to decide if I could afford to buy a box of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce. That kind of fear is its own kind of burning: quiet, invisible, yet just as consuming.

The Strength to Stay

It was during that time that I began to understand perseverance in a very different way. Not as grit or willpower or forced optimism, but as spiritual practice. Perseverance, at its deepest level, is not about pushing through. It is about staying in relationship—with our own soul, with mystery, and with whatever name we give to the presence that holds us through uncertainty. It’s not the victory after the fire—it’s the tenderness we cultivate in the middle of it.

Spiritual traditions across time use fire as a metaphor for purification. But the truth is, fire also leaves damage. Grief. Fear. A rupture in the life we knew. And in a time when everything from the news to our personal lives can feel unstable, it helps to remember that uncertainty has always been part of the spiritual landscape. The work is not in avoiding it, but in learning how to meet it.

The kind of perseverance I am speaking of is neither tidy nor triumphant. It allows for tears, doubt, collapse, and slow rebuilding. But it also trusts that something remains whole in us even when everything around us is breaking.

As Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, people can endure almost anything if they have a “why,” a sense of meaning or connection that helps them bear whatever they are going through. Modern research echoes this: The people who ultimately endure are not always those who feel strong or certain, but those who remain connected to meaning, purpose, and relationship. Those who find ways to stay anchored when external structures fail.

The Power Within You

Butterworth often spoke of the “God-potential” within each person—the capacity to rise not by pretending all is well, but by seeing life from a deeper vantage point. In that sense, perseverance is not about setting things right but seeing them differently, listening inwardly instead of being dominated by the noise of fear, outrage, and uncertainty.

There is a poem I return to during challenging times, titled “The Thing Is” by Ellen Bass. It begins: “to love life, to love it even / when you have no stomach for it …” That line still stops me. It reminds me that loving life in the midst of pain is not weakness or denial—it is a deeply spiritual form of perseverance.

Because, in the end, perseverance is not about being untouched by life. It is about having the will to keep loving, keep listening, keep beginning again—even when the way forward looks nothing like what we had hoped for.

And when the moment comes to begin again, may we do so not with certainty, but with breath, with compassion, and with wonder.