Perseverance

Last week, due to my trip to the big city, I skipped my Chinese class on Wednesday.  After the drama of the train station and returning home around 11:30 pm, I also decided to skip my 8 am Thursday morning Chinese class.  If I was a more motivated student, I would have reviewed the lessons I knew I was missing and would have tried to learn some of the characters.  Instead, in reality I didn’t touch my Chinese book from the time I left my class last Tuesday until the time I walked into the classroom this Tuesday.  Uhhh…yeah, not such a great idea on my part.  I found myself struggling through class, stumbling over characters that I knew I knew but for the life of me couldn’t remember.  You see, Chinese is not my first nature.  I’m trying to change my brain to be able to listen to, speak, read, and write Chinese.  It’s not something I can just pick up and work on when I have the time and inclination.  In order for my brain to change, it’s something that I need to persevere in working on day by day.  Let me confess something: effects I’m pretty lousy at persevering.

The same principle can be applied to exercise.  As I’ve mentioned before, I spend my mornings with Jillian.  If I’m consistently working out 4-5 days a week, it becomes much easier to complete the workout.  Not easy, but easier.  If I go a week, or two, or like what happened during my winter travels, six weeks the workout becomes quite painful and unbearable.  If I want to be physically fit, I need to exercise regularly, as in multiple times each week, the rest of my life.  I will never reach a point where I say, “Woohoo!  Now I’m completely fit, I can just sail through the rest of my life.”  That’s just not the way the body works.  Once again, perseverance is necessary.

The point I want to get to is, that if this is true of the mental and physical nature, how much more true is it of the spiritual nature?  Just like it is not in my mental nature to think and process in Chinese, it is not in our spiritual nature to follow, obey and do the will of the Father.  If we want our natures to be changed, it’s going to require a whole lot more time with the Father than just a check-in for a couple hours on Sunday, and when I have a few spare moments during the week.  Just like with the physical body, we are never going to reach a point in our lives where we say, “I know the Father enough, I’m good enough at following Him, I don’t need to spend as much time pursuing Him.”  If we have chosen His way as the way, the path and the direction of our lives, then we’ve signed up for a path that takes daily commitment and perseverance.  No wonder Paul found the need to admonish us to finish the race.  We are so apt to sit down and declare, “That’s far enough.”  But we don’t realize the fruit, and joy, and peace, and blessing that we forfeit when we fail to persevere.  It feels so good when I’ve been faithful in studying my characters and reviewing my lessons, and I go to class and have no problem reading an entire dialogue just in characters.  There’s a sense of accomplishment when I finish the cardio section of my workout video and realize I’m not out of breath.  How much greater will the joy be when we hear, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”?

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness, and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love.  For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of the truth.