My former BSF teaching leader Dottie liked to use the word perservere. I didn’t understand why she said it so often.
Perserverance is not a word you think about or define. It’s a concept you have to experience. My children are teaching me what it looks like.
Elliot is right now working on my website. It’s going on 2 hours nonstop since he first started on it. There seems to be an infinite amount of detail to sort through in the coding of a site. It takes PERSERVERANCE to get each line and link to work just right.
Audrey is working on a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. She looks at each piece in detail to fit it in just the right place. She sometimes works on it for an hour and only fit in two or three pieces. It takes PERSERVERANCE to complete a daunting task.
I have to say, perserverance is not my strong point.
At the start of a task, I am already thinking about stopping. It’s not that I want to quit. I just want to stop for a while, take a break, do something else, anything but keep on task. I find it hard to stay on a job until it’s done.
I wash half of the dishes and leave the rest in the sink till tomorrow. Some of the clothes do not get folded and end up on the floor. Let’s not even talk about my photo albums…
When something is easy and fun, the experience of perserverance is not needed.
When the job is hard, and you’d much rather go do something else, but you don’t, that is perserverance.
Without perserverance, nothing gets done right. It is half finished, left hanging, incomplete, the puzzle doesn’t get solved.
Now I know why Dottie kept reminding us to perservere. I needed to hear it. I am learning that things are not always easy, and to perservere is a good thing.