Welcome to "Tuesday Morning"—loaded with inspiration and challenge for Christians everywhere. A fresh new week is before you. Advance!

 

Walt Disney once said,

 

"Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it, and work at it until it's done, and done right."

 

How many unfinished sermons are sitting in a preacher's filing cabinet, waiting for a moment of inspiration for the preacher to revisit a topic that once was relevant? How many artists' canvasses are stacked in a corner, waiting for a painter to return to his oils and brushes? How many novels remain half written in manuscript form or in a computer folder, waiting to be completed by an author who lost her motivation before the task was finished? How many poems lack only one or two stanzas for completion? How many symphonies lay partially scored, never to see the light of day? Too many to count.

 

Disney understood the problem. In another context he said, "All our dreams can come true—if we have the courage to pursue them."

 

If you have ever set aside a project, in the hope that it would rise to the surface of your mind again and be completed, this essay is for you. The title is, "Finish the Game." It may be one of the most important reads for you this year. Continue reading whenever you are ready, and then get to work. You will be glad that you did.

 

Tom Barnard

A Frustrated Multi-tasker

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Finish the Game

Tom Barnard

 

gnatius of Loyola was engaged in a physically-challenging game with other male students when one of them stopped the game and asked the question, “What would each of you do if you knew you had only twenty minutes to live?” All of the players admitted that they would rush immediately to the church and pray—all except Ignatius, who answered, “I would finish my game first.”

 

While “persistence” is not one of the fruit of the Spirit listed in Galatians 5:22, “self-control” is. And it is very much like persistence when it comes to choosing between abandoning a task or seeing it through to its completion.

 

Archibald J. Cronin was a Scottish physician who wanted to be a novelist. Born in 1896 he was awarded a scholarship in 1914 to study medicine at the University of Glasgow. World War I interrupted his studies, however, and he served as a Royal Navy surgeon before completing his medical degree in 1919. In 1924 he was appointed Medical Inspector of Mines for Great Britain, and in subsequent years his research and reports on the correlation between coal dust inhalation and pulmonary disease won him both high honors and the admiration of colleagues in medicine around the world.

 

In 1930 he was forced to take medical leave after being diagnosed with chronic stomach ulcers. He used his leave of absence to begin writing his first novel, Hatter’s Castle. He found the task to be frustrating, once asking himself, “Why am I wearing myself out with this toil for which I am so preposterously ill-equipped? I ought to be resting…conserving, not squandering my energies on this fantastic task.” Discouraged about his early lack of fulfillment in writing, he bundled up the manuscript and threw it in the trash outside the farmhouse where he was staying. And in an attempt to recapture his “sanity,” he went for a walk in the drizzling rain.

 

Along the loch shore he came upon an old farmer who was laboring with turning the soil with a shovel, made more difficult by the rain. Cronin inquired about why he was digging in the stubborn ground. The old man stopped digging and replied, “My father ditched this bog all his days and never made a pasture. I’ve dug it all my days and I’ve never made a pasture. But pasture or no pasture, I canna help but dig. For my father knew and I know that if you only dig enough, a pasture can be made here.”

 

Challenged by these words from the farmer, Cronin hurried back to the trash container and retrieved the water-soaked manuscript. He dried the pages in the kitchen oven and returned to the task of writing. Three months later the manuscript was finished. Satisfied now with his effort, but without any assurance from a publisher, he sent off the manuscript and forgot about it. Later he wrote, “In the days which followed I gradually regained my health, and I began to chafe at idleness. I wanted to be back in harness”—in the practice of medicine, not writing.

 

On the day he was to leave the small village and return to his career, he went around town, saying his good-byes to the simple folk who had befriended him. When he entered the post-office, the postmaster presented him with a telegram—a notice of acceptance by the publisher. The novel that he had tried to throw away, Hatter’s Castle, became a huge success and made the doctor wealthy. It was translated into nineteen languages, bought by a Hollywood studio, and sold millions of copies. He would eventually write many more novels and stories, including Grand Canary, The Stars Look Down, and The Citadel.

 

Commenting many years later on the lesson he learned when writing his first novel, Cronin said, “Today, when the air resounds with shrill defeatist cries, when half of our stricken world is wailing in discouragement: ‘What is the use to work, to save, to go on living, with Armageddon round the corner?’…In this present chaos, with no shining vision to sustain us, the door is wide open to darkness and despair. The way to close that door is to stick to the job that we are doing, no matter how insignificant that job may be, to go on doing it, and to finish it.” He penned those words for Readers Digest in 1941, during World War II. Their relevance in these days of national and international turmoil should be obvious to us all.