By Dr. Julie O’Connell
“So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what He has promised.”
I am writing to you today as someone who gets overwhelmed, fearful, and stuck from time to time. I will give you an example: I rent out a condominium to tenants, and their lease is up. I have no desire to live in that property myself, and the real estate market is great. There are benefits that will likely come from my selling the property now, not the least of which is freedom from being a landlord (a job I don’t especially enjoy). Still, I can sit in front of a situation like this in a state of paralysis. How will I walk through all of the steps it will take to get to the closing?
Angela Duckworth, the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has dealt with this issue. In a book she wrote (that actually became a New York Times bestseller),[2] she asked military cadets, schoolteachers, and 5th grade spelling experts why they were successful. As the title of her book indicates, Duckworth discovered that these individuals succeeded because they had “grit,” which she defined as “passion and perseverance for the long term.” It wasn’t how big their dreams were or how much they achieved; the achievers she surveyed succeeded because of how much they could overcome and for how long.
Many of us face difficulties in life, and we give up. It seems too hard for us, and we feel like throwing in the towel. We feel like we can’t do it alone. Well, I’m writing today to tell you that we shouldn’t quit. As Duckworth says, we need grit, but it’s something many of us lack. Why?
1. Our perspectives are often limited. We only need to look to the Old Testament to realize this. Just before Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, he and the Israelites circled the city for seven days. For the first six, they went quietly and followed the Lord’s command, marching once each day around the city. Those walls seemed high, and God’s promise seemed impossible to obtain. All they could likely see were problems, and all they could feel was doubt. But they stayed on in faith. On the seventh day, the priests blew their trumpets, the men shouted, they marched around the city seven times, and then the walls came tumbling down. [3]
Sometimes, we only see problems all around us: walls that seem impossible to break through. But if we remain in faith and keep following what God wants, He will take care of the rest. We can’t see what He has promised from our vantage point, but we also can’t give up because we may be closer to the end than we know.
I like how those men were quietly walking for six days. I like it because I think that walking can be a spiritual practice. Author Rebecca Solnit comments on this in her book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. She writes:
Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors…disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.”[4]
What I’m learning is that when I’m walking, I can be present in my experience, but I need to be quiet and walk by faith, trusting that I am closer than I think. When faced with wall-sized problems, I find myself asking, “Where is God? Why me?” Perhaps God is building my faith and I’m in my six days of walking because He is changing me before He changes my circumstance. Lord knows I am not perfect: as it says in Proverbs 25:4, I’m silver mixed with dross. The bad parts in me (the dross) are stopping the blacksmith (God) from doing his work. My dross is almost always made up of insecurity and fear. Still, in order for the vessel to become pure silver, the blacksmith has to remove the dross (actually, with fire)! So the walking is going to be difficult: “no pain, no gain,” as they say. Another way of thinking of it, though, is how it is referred to in my silver-sneaker yoga class: “no pain, no strain.” I can take care of myself as I’m walking through this hard work, this life.
For the Israelites, it was 40 years of wandering and wondering where God was. It’s the same for us. Life is hard, and no one is spared. We can’t ever fully imagine the private battles each and every person we meet is facing. Our burdens may seem heavy, but we can’t stop walking.
2. We don’t see the progress we are making. This is another reason why we give up, but it is in these times that we must realize that God is still with us. Even when we are tempted to quit, we have to stick together and keep walking. God’s promise may be closer than we know.
A famous swimmer named Florence Chadwick was the first woman to swim the English Channel both ways. One day, she was on a different swim, fifteen hours into it, and very tired. She asked those who were in the small rowboat accompanying her if she could get into their boat and quit.
“Don’t get in! Keep going!” they told her.
But no. She couldn’t go on, so she stopped, pulled herself into the boat, and gave up. After she gathered herself together, she peered out into the distance, and from that vantage point, she saw that if she had just kept going a little bit more, she would have made it to the finish. Indeed, she was less that ½ mile to the shore.
We can’t always see the whole picture, and we can’t see what God can see, but if we continue to trust Him and let him refine us through our laps in the sea and our laps around the city, we will get there. If we quit, we might find out that we were only one lap away from victory.
Today, victory may be closer than we think, so keep swimming, through the fog and the rain, and keep marching around impossibly tall walls. Wait for them to collapse before you. The world is going to tell you to give up, and when the pain feels like it’s too much to bear, you will want to quit, but you can’t. Walk by faith, not by sight. Persevere.
Don’t throw in the towel today. Remember that Jesus took that towel to wash people’s feet, the day before His last supper on earth. He kept his eyes focused on his Father, despite what He had to walk through. That’s what we should do, too. Don’t stop working harder and reaching higher. Each day, you are getting a little bit closer to the end. You’re almost there.
[1] https://biblehub.com/niv/hebrews/10.htm
[2] Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. , 2016. Print.
[3] Joshua 6:1-27.
[4] Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Viking, 2000. Print