Continue

Continue

They encouraged them to continue in the faith, reminding them that we must suffer many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.

MY BROTHER JUSTIN is an efficiency expert. An industrial engineer by training, he finds the choke points, the slowest parts in any process, and then reimagines and reworks that small piece until it is efficient and productive before moving on to the next slowest part, and then the next. His work on improving factory assembly lines leaks into all areas of his and—by extension—our lives, with his ability to identify and problem solve the weak points in a plan a wonderful tool that has resulted in great advice over the years.

When asked for advice recently about a potential project that had me frustrated, he suggested I needed to continue forward rather than stopping every time I encountered an obstacle. His actual words to me were to stop stopping and start starting, the catchy phrase gleaned somewhere along the way in the myriad of books he reads and the obstacles he encounters on a routine basis. It’s often the stops and pauses that cause breakdowns and inefficiency in systems and processes, and finding ways to continue pressing forward by eliminating the stops and restarts brings success faster than more elaborate, difficult-to-implement solutions.

Honestly, his words weren’t what I wanted to hear. I was longing for permission to quit proactively because continuing was too hard, or at least pause with the hope that perhaps I need not restart for an indefinite amount of time—a quit by default, if you will. But his words are true, and I was finding a million reasons to stop and keep stopping, none of which got me closer to the finish line.

God will use us as his hands and feet, but we have to be willing to stay the course, to continue, even when the way forward is more challenging than we anticipated. Saying yes to God is always an adventure worth taking, but we’ll get nowhere if we balk every time we encounter an obstacle. In fact, it’s often in the hardships that we finally give up the illusion of control and rely entirely upon God, developing a deeply rooted faith because we continued, because we watched God show up in circumstances beyond our own abilities.

Lord, make us doers of your Word, women who continue to stay the course, even when obstacles are harder than we’d imagined. Amen.

-Julie

One Good Step: Stop stopping and start starting. Take an actionable step forward to continue something you’ve been wanting to quit because it was hard.