Here is this week's little devotional. The concepts are applicable for even the relatively unimportant (when compared with the spiritual) realm of work as well.

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This week, I just want to focus on the power of persistence. The return of Fall Semester hours has meant that I now am required by university policy to take a 65-minute lunch, and I try to use as many of those as I can to work out and otherwise forestall the creep of the frost of physical, maturity, shall we say. Well, yesterday it was time to do some lifting, and instead of just counting what I did, I did a little bit of math as well. I added up all the pounds that I moved during the session (180 pounds times 30 total reps... you get the idea). Anyway, I found out that in less than an hour, I had single-handedly moved 28,380 pounds around. That's over 14 TONS, and it wasn't even that hard of a workout.

The point of this is that our days are filled with activities that we just do and don't even consider. Try it sometime - wear a pedometer and see how many steps you take in a given day, or week, then do the math and see how far you've traveled without really going anywhere. It will surprise you about as much as it surprised me how much I'd moved without creating or destroying anything.

We are surrounded by challenges, dangers, temptations and opportunities. We have mounds of issues and tasks to deal with, and we have many miles to go before we sleep, as Frost says. We can look at them as one insurmountable obstacle, or we can patiently and steadily keep our eyes on them, like Paul wrote about keeping our eyes on the prize. When I looked at the car in the afternoon, I said to myself that there is no way that I could lift it, yet I found that my gradual efforts lifted at least 6 times as much as what I thought I couldn't lift at all.

This week, and every week, let's keep our eyes focused on the prize of a successful, God-approved life. We will continually be there if we work steadily onward. We're told that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed and we say to the mountain that it should move, then it would move. I submit that to be absolutely true, but that it is also likely that when we do have that faith, and do say to the mountain, "Move," God may well hand us a teaspoon and say, "Yes, let's get this done...together, my child. We will learn to overcome together, with great effort and unbelievable rewards."

Peace!