Word on Fire is brought to you by Catholic cemeteries, serving the Chicago area since 1837, and FSP dedicated to food service excellence.

This is Cardinal Francis George, and I invite you to join me for the next few minutes to reflect with Father Robert Barron on the Word of God, which is the Word on Fire.

Father Barron will challenge us to open our hearts to the Word on Fire, which is God's Word of Love for each of us.

If our hearts are open, the Lord can change and transform us, so that we might speak with love about the one who is love.

The Archdiocese of Chicago through the generosity of Sacred Heart Parish and Winetka now presents the Word on Fire.

Peace be with you.

Friends, one of my favorite literary genre is biography. I love reading biographies. In fact, when I go to a bookstore, I usually go to biography first, and then eventually make my way over to religion and philosophy and things like that.

But biography, I love. In fact, for my sort of fun reading, my bedside reading, I'm usually working on a biography of a great figure, politician or artist or whatever it is.

Here's something I've discovered in the course of my years of reading biographies. Almost invariably, there is the thorn in the flesh moment or the thorn in the flesh principle.

Here's what I mean. In the lives of great people, you can almost invariably find some great suffering, some great anxiety, some great agony.

That somehow forms the very center of the story, becomes the hinge on which the story turns, becomes the key to understanding that person.

In fact, now when I read a biography and you're going along with the usual facts and so on, I start watching for it or waiting for it. When will I find the thorn in the flesh?

In fact, I'm going to push the principle a little further. The greater the person, the greater this thorn, the greater the struggle.

I started reading biographies of Abraham Lincoln when I was about eight, and I've been reading them ever since. I read, not every book, obviously they've been thousands written on them, but on a steady basis, I read biographies of Lincoln.

In Lincoln's life, you can see this principle clearly on display. Almost all of his adult life, Abraham Lincoln wrestled with a severe depression.

You see it in the earliest days when he was a young man in Illinois and in Springfield and so on, going through the legislature. All his years as a lawyer, you see it very clearly during his years as president. Lincoln struggled with a debilitating depression.

In fact, during the terrible years of the Civil War, Lincoln couldn't sleep well. He would wander the halls of the White House in this deep melancholy.

One time he said, he almost imagined the room he was in, filling up with the blood of all the people dying on the battlefield. They knew of course that he was to some degree responsible for it.

One time someone asked him, how come you tell all those funny stories? Lincoln said, because sometimes I feel if I didn't tell those funny stories, I would just be crying all the time.

His son really died when Lincoln was in the White House. He would stalk out to the grave sometimes at night, just to be by his side.

Once he even asked that the young boy be exhumed that he might look at him again. This is someone who wrestled with a very deep depression.

Did it debilitate him? Did it wreck him, destroy him? Obviously not. In fact, many people argue it was this very depression, this very darkness in Lincoln that enabled him to enter with such compassion into the suffering of others.

...