You ought to live holy and godly lives.
—2 Peter 3:11
When Ludwig Nobel died in 1888 a French journalist mistakenly thought the deceased was Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and posted a front-page story calling him, “The dynamite king! Merchant of death!”
The column crushed Alfred. It wasn’t how he wanted to be remembered.
He turned his attention to benevolent projects, and left his entire fortune to endow the Nobel Foundation, part of which funded the Nobel Peace Prize.
When he died in 1896, Alfred’s obituary described him as “a great humanitarian.”
We are not likely to wake up in the morning and find our obituary in the paper. But if we did, what would it say?
We don’t get better by chance,
we get better by choice.