Perseverance: A Personal Reflection

A few weekends ago, a few of us TFC students went down to Orlando, Florida to attend a conference called “The Send.” This conference centered on the calling of every believer to take action in their faith. Lasting from 10am to 10pm, this conference consisted of 12 hours of pure praise and worship. I do not know how long you view 12 hours, but I can assure you that it is a very long time. We stayed on the conference field for the entirety of the time, in a crowd of over 50,000 people. The Florida sun was merciless, but let me assure you; it was worth it. By about hour 3, many of us were laying on the turf, trying to regain some of the energy lost from worshiping in the intense heat. By hour 6, we were all taking turns sitting down. But that did not stop us from worshiping. No, even at 8pm that night, the entire stadium was up out of their seats, dancing and jumping around in worship. We did not listen to our exhaustion to tell us what we could or could not do. Instead, we looked at God and saw how worthy he is of worship, and in response, we worshiped with every fiber of our soul.

The idea of perseverance in this moment was the push to worship through the exhaustion, heat, sunburn, and longing to take a nap. I want to call you to grasp onto the same perseverance in this semester, similar to the way an entire stadium worth of people were able to persevere throughout the day to be just as energetic at 10pm as they were at 10am . I think we all realize that we are at one of the hardest parts of the semester, in which motivation to do our work is hard to find, and finding time to do our work may be even harder. We also must realize that our work in class is not pointless. It is not outwardly worded so, but the simple things we do for our classes are still just as good of an opportunity for worship as a church service is. To worship is simply to bring glory to God through what you do. This means you can worship through reading a book, completing a project, or even just by showing up to class. When we start to look at our daily lives in this way, we start to reflect Jesus even just a little bit more. So, rise up from the turf, in the hot sun, persevere through the discomfort and pain and worship him with everything you have. This means doing the work for the class you do not like; this means actually reading what you need to for that reading log; and more importantly, this means doing it all for the glory of the one most high.