Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise (Hebrews 10:35-36). My husband and I were walking through the airport about 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning after a two and a half hour ride from home to get there. It didn’t help that I had gotten up at 4:00 a.m. after less than four hours of sleep, part of which was disturbed periodically by Lucy, my little Yorkie, trying to find her comfortable spot. I might have been better off to not even have gone to bed at all. Or better yet, maybe I shouldn’t even have agreed to go on this trip. What a pitiful way to start a day, especially with such a sour attitude. “Is anything wrong?” my husband asked. I replied, “I’m so over all this traveling. To me it’s just one more place to have to be that takes me away from home.” Well, as usually happens, I felt convicted and convinced by my heavenly Father to repent of such an attitude. After reaching the gate from which our flight was departing, I quickly found a quiet spot where I could ask God to help me change my outlook on this situation and remember that the people we were going to minister to would hopefully be blessed and encouraged by our effort to be with them. After all, that was the reason for this trip anyway. It wasn’t about me or my comfort. It was about continuing on with a good attitude no matter how I felt at the beginning of the day. This brought the thought of endurance to my mind. Just as we must sometimes endure in the physical realm, we certainly GRACE NOTES 39 need to be reminded that we must endure in the spiritual realm as well. Webster’s Dictionary gives us the definition of endurance as: “Constancy, bearing up, perseverance, continuance, steadfastness, holding out, patient endurance.” It describes the capacity to continue to “bear up under difficult circumstances, not with a passive complacency, but with a hopeful fortitude that actively resists weariness and defeat.” Did it say actively resists weariness and defeat? Actively is a word that implies you are doing something. That means I must be a participant. I have to do my part to resist the urge to feel defeated and weary. Because I know when I do my part, God will certainly do His part. So, just as we realize these feelings will be there from time to time, we also are aware that God is faithful to help us with them. Endurance can come with a joy in knowing we are doing all that we can to add to the kingdom of God.
