I’ve got this small plaque sitting on my desk at work.  In the center of it, in large letters, is the word DETERMINATION.  I received it a number of years ago from a  friend as a way of encouraging me to not give up when things got tough.  Under the word is a small verse, it reads: Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.  (Psalm 37:5).

I’ve heard it said that the number one cause of failure is quitting once you have failed. The point is that having failed does not make you a failure. In fact, everyone fails at some point.  What makes us failures is quitting and refusing to try again once we have failed. I think that is what the Psalmist was getting at:  Commit thy way, Trust in Him. The essence of our Faith, of our life in Christ, rests on these two words, commit and trust.

First, we commit our way.  Not a commitment that we walk out of when things aren’t working out; no, this is more the commitment of jumping out of an airplane with a parachute on.  You’re committed at that point, no going back, just riding it out.  And what do we commit?  Our way, the path that God has, uniquely, for each of us.  Our verse that the poet Whitman suggested we could contribute.  We jump out of the plane with that and we get ready for the ride. That’s the crazy, scary part.

But next, we trust.  In what?  Not in what we can do or the luck of the stars or the economy.  We trust in the only thing that is truly trustworthy, we trust in God.  We trust that he really is orchestrating our journey and that it is only through him that our commitment will pay off.

That is DETERMINATION!  Committing to the very thing that God has called us to, trusting him even when it doesn’t seem possible, and accepting our failed attempts while refusing to give up in spite of them.  And then a promise:  He Shall bring it to pass!

To the King,

David