“I’m more and more impressed with people who simply keep on keeping on.”

A thought by Mark Batterson, Richard Foth, and Susanna Foth Aughtmon (2015-04-28) from their book, A Trip around the Sun: Turning Your Everyday Life into the Adventure ofa Lifetime (p. 72). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

I have started every day for many years doing one thing. I read from the Psalms and I read from the NT. Right now I am in Paul’s second letter to the young man, Timothy. I love what I read this morning in verse 7 of chapter 4. Paul said, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful.” No matter what has happened to me, “I have remained faithful.” That is what Mark is talking about here.

He says, “I’m more and more impressed with people who simply keep on keeping on. I love the phrase ‘little by little’ in Exodus 23: 30. We want a lot by a lot, but that’s not the way it works in God’s kingdom ventures. Malcolm Gladwell refers to it as the ‘ten-thousand-hour rule.’ If you really want to get good at anything, you’ve got to work at it for ten thousand hours. You can’t cheat the system.”

But so many people don’t do the little things that make their marriage successful, or the task God has given them, or their health. At the first sign of a problem or a failure they are ready to run.

He says, “Some suggest that a successful life is a single upward trajectory of one win laid on top of the next. God says, ‘I will take your biggest failures and use them to my advantage.’ Your ability to see failure as a necessary stepping stone directly correlates with your ability to dream bigger and dream better. If you are willing to risk it all and step out in faith, God can recycle your mistakes.”

Don’t let problems or failures stop you. They didn’t stop Jesus, they didn’t stop the Apostle Paul and they didn’t stop Joseph in the OT. And they shouldn’t stop you. Just be faithful. Keep at it.

Mark finishes this section by saying, “I have some more good failures in front of me. And in return, I believe they will yield more opportunities, more leaps of faith, more wins, and more successes. Safety is highly overrated. Why not risk it all and live the life you were meant to live?”

So why not?

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