I hate quitting. I will try E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G before ever giving up on something, because ‘mama didn’t raise no quitter’. It takes more strength for me to admit that I’m wrong or that I can’t do something than it does for me to continuously keep hitting the same brick wall…

…and life is full of brick walls. One day I found myself trying to scale the same problem and was just failing miserably. I finally said to the Lord, I quit. I fold. I’m done. I can’t. I’m throwing in the towel. To my surprise, He didn’t say ‘no, my child… don’t do that. You can’t quit!’ Instead, He said, ‘good… but make sure to pick up a new one. A clean one.’ You see, you can’t keep using the same dirty, wet towel and expect to get clean and dry.

Perseverance sometimes means quitting. Not giving up, but quitting in the sense of letting go of what’s not working so that we can keep going. Letting go of our own ideas on how things should be or be done. Quit trying to do things in our own strength.

With fall wrapping up, a corn maze comes to mind. There’s one goal: get out of it…. and it’s full of dead ends. If we keep trying to make a dead end work, or scale that problem wall, THAT is actually quitting. We have given up or forgotten the actual goal. We (and I mean myself) become so focused in on the problem, spending so much energy trying to cut things down that we were never meant to even touch that we fail to just turn around to see the path He has cleared for us.

Sometimes what we identify as an obstacle is actually a barrier – a wall – that isn’t meant to come down; it’s purpose is to keep us in…keep us safe…keep us on track. It’s there to cause us to turn around and make actual progress. We tend to think that to persevere we always have to push through obstacles, when there are times that we have actually encountered a boundary that doesn’t need to be crossed. We have to stop trying to do things our way, turn to the Lord, and move along. If we seek Him, He will show us the way. We might find a dozen more dead ends along the way too, but like I said, life is full of brick walls.