When he was a little boy his
uncle called him “Sparky”, after a comic-strip horse named Spark Plug. School
was all but impossible for Sparky.
He failed every subject in the
eighth grade. He flunked physics in high school, getting a grade of zero. He
also flunked Latin, algebra and English. And his record in sports wasn’t any
better. Though he did manage to make the school’s golf team, he promptly lost
the only important match of the season. Oh, there was a consolation match; he
lost that too.
Throughout his youth, Sparky was
awkward socially. It wasn’t that the other students disliked him; it’s just
that no one really cared all that much. In fact, Sparky was astonished if a
classmate ever said hello to him outside of school hours. There’s no way to
tell how he might have done at dating. He never once asked a girl out in high
school. He was too afraid of being turned down… or perhaps laughed at. Sparky
was a loser. He, his classmates… everyone knew it. So he learned to live with
it. He made up his mind early that if things were meant to work out, they
would. Otherwise he would content himself with what appeared to be his
inevitable mediocrity.
One thing WAS important to Sparky,
however — drawing. He was proud of his artwork. No one else appreciated it. But
that didn’t seem to matter to him. In his senior year of high school, he
submitted some cartoons to the yearbook. The editors rejected the concept.
Despite this brush-off, Sparky was convinced of his ability. He even decided to
become an artist.
So, after completing high school,
Sparky wrote to Walt Disney Studios. They asked for samples of his artwork.
Despite careful preparation, it too was rejected…one more confirmation that he
was a loser.
But Sparky still didn’t give up.
Instead, he decided to tell his own life’s story in cartoons. The main
character would be a little boy who symbolized the perpetual loser and chronic
underachiever. You know him well. Because Sparky’s cartoon character went on to
become a cultural phenomenon of sorts. People readily identified with this
“lovable loser.” He reminded people of the painful and embarrassing moments
from their own past, of their pain and their shared humanity. The character
soon became famous worldwide: “Charlie Brown.” And Sparky, the boy whose many
failures never kept him from trying, whose work was rejected again and again, is
the highly successful cartoonist Charles Schultz. His cartoon strip, “Peanuts,”
continues to inspire books, T-shirts and Christmas specials, reminding us, as
someone once commented that life somehow finds a way for all of us, even the
losers.
Sparky’s story reminds us of a very
important principle in life. We all face difficulty and discouragement from
time to time. We also have a choice in how we handle it. If we’re persistent,
if we hold fast to our faith, if we continue to develop the unique talents God
has given us, who knows what can happen? We may end up with an insight and an
ability to inspire that comes only through hardship. In the end, there are no
“losers” with God. Some winners just take longer to develop!
‘Peanuts’ is a syndicated daily and
Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which
ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward.
The strip is the most popular and
influential in the history of the comic strip, with 17,897 strips published in
all, making it “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being”,
according to Robert Thompson of Syracuse University. At its peak, Peanuts ran in
over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and
was translated into 21 languages.
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