I Was Just Thinking SHOWING UP
	DECEMBER 2005

by Don Huntington, Editor In Chief

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” (Woody Allen)

I’ve learned from my own experience the accuracy of Woody Allen’s quote about “showing up.” Almost every good thing that has come to me in my life has been the result of the grace of Heaven mixing with some level of persistence or faithfulness on my part. I need to be consistent! I need to be dependable!

Any professional success I’ve had in my life has resulted from going to work even during those times I didn’t particularly feel like doing so. In particular, relationships in my life flourish or wither to the extent that I continue “showing up” for people or absenting myself in some way.

George Matheson was a blind man who learned Hebrew and Greek, memorized great sections of the Bible, and could speak so capably in public that hearers were often unaware of his blindness.

So George Mathesom knew what he was talking about when he wrote:

To lie down in the time of grief, to be quiet under the stroke of adverse fortune, implies a great strength; but I know of something that implies a strength greater still: it is the power to work under stress; to have a great weight at your heart and still run; to have a deep anguish in your spirit and still perform the daily tasks….

The hardest thing is that most of us are called to exercise our patience, not in the sickbed but in the street.

The Bible says that a healthy spiritual life produces the qualities of love, joy, peace, patient endurance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

CS Lewis once made the astute observation that the third quality, “patient endurance” was in one sense the most important, because without discipline, a person couldn’t have any of the other characteristics in very great measure.

If I constantly permit the winds of my feelings to blow me here and there, I can’t effectively love, and my life will be joyless. I will be chaotic not peaceful, and so forth.

The Bible gives us a promise, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

The American social reformer, photographer, and journalist, Jacob Riis, once wrote:

I look at a stonecutter hammering away at a rock 100 times without so much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow it splits in two. I know it was not the one blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

Of course, it doesn’t really help to merely tell me that I ought not to give up “doing good.” No one, for example, ever left their married partner without knowing that they should have persisted in unconditionally loving that person — “until death do us part...,” as they had promised.

In most cases, people getting a divorce would claim that they had no choice. Reminding them that they should persist in their original intention doesn’t help them to actually do so.

I’ve been married to the same person for more than 40 years, but I’ll freely admit that I’m no stronger in mind and will than most divorced people that I’m acquainted with.

I know my heart! On the basis of my own strength I could never continue to do the things I know I ought to do. I would have been divorced long ago; I would probably be living in a van somewhere on government assistance.

I need a quality of grace in my life to lift me above the circumstances of my limited spiritual powers. And, in fact, the Bible refers to the list of spiritual qualities I spoke about as fruit. I simply permit the sunshine and rain of Heaven to fall into my life, and the fruit simply grows.

Every day I try to recite to myself an ancient promise:

“He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

I want to live like that! I want to be persistent and consistent in my life, but not as plodding drudgery. I want to fly! I want to soar! By the power that Heaven gives to me, I’m going to continue to “do good.” I’m going to “keep on keeping on” for the rest of my life, I hope. At least I’ll show up today, for sure.