To finish well will cost us something.  It may cost us everything. Just ask anyone who has ever run a marathon or competed in a triathlon. Starting is easy. It is finishing that is hard. It is finishing that requires blood, sweat, and tears.  It is finishing that requires courage.

The race really does go to the tortoise and not the hare.  It is perseverance that ultimately will win the prize, not knowledge, not talent, and not connections.  It is that undying tenacity that sets itself on the end, that finishes the race, that completes the task, and that fulfills the responsibility.

As Calvin Coolidge sagely observed,

“Nothing can take the place of persistence.  Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.  Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not.  The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are overwhelmingly powerful.”

So, how do we train ourselves to finish what we start?  How do we cut across the grain of our instant-everything culture?  How do we subdue our got-to-have-it-now appetites so that we can undertake our tasks with forbearance and resolve?

First, we must come to the realization that such a virtue is hardly easy…

1. To see things through to the end demands courage

Though we tend to admire courage, we often have to admit that there is in it an unexplainable admixture of boldness and madness in it.  Concerned with our own health and welfare, we find it more than a little extraordinary when anyone is willing to risk life and limb for the sake of others—much less for the sake of some principle.  Indeed, we have become an age with a dearth of heroes. Bravery has practically become a forgotten virtue—a lost cause. Nevertheless, its allure retains as strong a grip on us today as it has each of the many generations that have preceded us.

According to C.S. Lewis,

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.  A chastity or honesty or mercy, which yields to danger, will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful until it became risky.”

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