AS DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL, PREPARED TO PASS FROM THIS life sometime around the year 970 BC, he called his son Solomon to his side and spoke his final words. This is how he began: “I am about to go the way of all the earth. Be strong, and show yourself a man” (1 Kings 2:2 ESV).

Our first man in the “relatively unknown” category is a bit of an oddity. We don’t know much about him.

We are introduced to this man simply. He was, we are told, “more honorable than his brothers.”

But our man—his name was Yabetz, by the way—was suffocating. Having lived for many years in a home with small-minded, backward-looking people, he felt like a man being crushed to death.

He went and stood before his God and prayed this: “Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.” And the last words of this five-sentence story in the middle of an ancient document tell us that God answered his request.

The core lesson comes to us fiery and fast. Honorable men refuse to wallow in the small and the bitter. Honorable men refuse to hate life because something once went wrong. Honorable men don’t build monuments to their disappointments, nor do they let others brand them and curse them to their destruction.

Honorable men seek out the highest definition of their lives, the nobler meaning granted by heritage, by their ancestors’ dreams and their parents’ hopes. Honorable men cry out to God until curses are broken and a grander purpose is achieved. Honorable men don’t settle for lives of regret.

Winston Churchill was indeed the greatest man of his age. His life was astonishingly rich and productive. His gifts were measured in the gratitude of millions. His impact upon his world cannot be fully measured yet. It must be left to generations yet unborn.

What he became, both the flawed man and the heroic statesman, was fashioned largely by the crushing force of his father’s hatred. We can pity Churchill for this agonizing experience, but we should also be grateful that in his battle to outstrip what could have been a deforming curse, he offers us vital lessons of true manhood.

The truth is that Churchill simply made a choice. He might have given himself to snarling bitterness and regret. Instead, he decided to see himself as an extension of the good in his father’s life. He chose a pleasant continuity rather than a harsh antagonism.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, gentlemen, but my experience is that, generally speaking, if a man does not arrive at a meaning for his pains—and if that meaning does not evolve into a mandate for his future—then he is very likely to allow his sufferings to crush him. He’ll use them as an excuse for failure, a barrier against people, and a shield against his own emotions.