Don't Quit

I know sometimes we all get fed up with our our lives are going at one point or another. When we get in those times, we are only seeing one snapshot of our life. We aren't looking at the memories behind us and we can't see the future in front of us. We see only one time that seems tough and nothing is going quite right.

We want to give up, say nothing is obviously paying off, and who would even notice if we stopped all of our hard work. The whole problem with feeling that way is that when we looks back through our memories, we remember being frustrated throughout the process but when we see the end results, it's worth it. Just because we don't see immediate results doesn't mean that we won't see them in the long-run. We are so impatient and want our lives to be at the rate of fast food instead of a sit down restaurant.  When I stop and think about life, I would rather sit down and take my time rather than rush through it all. Yes, we get frustrated. Yes, we want to quit. If you quit, you are making all of your work a waste of time. It's a self-fulling prophecy. You cause yourself to fail when you quit. If we keep going, our hard work pays off, even if it isn't quite in the way we expect.

The payoff could be getting exactly what we want or it could be the realization that what we thought we wanted really isn't the path we want to take. When we get fed up with not getting what we think we want, we just give up. It's like the little kid who wants that ice cream cone and when he doesn't get it, he throws a temper tantrum kicking and screaming. He ends up pouting and being mad when in reality he didn't get that ice cream cone because it was right before dinner.

We don't know what is going to happen next, we don't see the big picture. God can, we can't. That's where trust comes in. Trust that He will lead you where you need to go, not where you want to go. We may want that ice cream cone, but we really find out later that a healthy dinner before dessert is exactly what we needed. We'll also find that what we needed is really what we want in the long run.

So, when we get frustrated and want to quit, we need to remember that we could be on the horizon of getting to where we need to be. If we hold on, then everything could work out to being more than we can ever hope for, way better than a little ice cream cone.