Keep At It

When I was young, we lived in a mixed and somewhat scruffy neighborhood.  Down the block lived Mr. Downs, who wore suits instead of working clothes like the rest of us.  He prided himself on using long and high hat vocabulary.  One of the frequent admonitions from the rocking chair on his porch to the squealing, giggling, roller skating, hop scotching kids below on the sidewalk in front of his house would be: THAT IS IT!!!!!  CEASE AND PERSIST!!!!

For a few years, his delivery alone resulted in us scattering.  That is, until I looked up both works in our brittle dictionary.  You couldn't DO both those things at the same time.  You either stopped or you kept at it, whatever 'it' was.

Now, all these years later, I read the story of how Abraham is shouting to God, in effect, asking God to PERSIST in being merciful, even for the sake of a few good men and to CEASE being angry, destroying everything.

Jesus encouraged - and often rewarded - the persistent.  The blind man, the woman with the blood condition.  He even tells the humorous tale of a man trying to borrow a few loaves of bread from a friend in the dead of night.  The man kept nagging, begging, banging on the door of his friends home  -- no one is going to sleep through that ... the man who persisted got what he needed (he may have gotten some choice words as well, but they aren't recorded in the story).

Jesus doesn't counsel us to sit back, think lovely thoughts and all will be well.  No.  We are called to act, to ask, to knock, to search.  We are not called to cease ... but to persist!