At the end of a day we want to look back with a sense of satisfaction. No matter what kind of day it was – a busy day, a day of trouble, or a day of ease – we want to feel satisfied with our day.

My Saturday could have blown up in my face … it certainly didn’t go down as one of the most memorable days of my life. But at the end of it, satisfaction is what I felt.

It started as a great day; I had nothing pressing, could do anything I decided to do. There were a couple of things that were in the back of my mind that I wanted to do, like go for a bike ride.

It was a warm, sunny fall day with the leaves turning – everything outside was inviting. Instead, I ended up sitting on my couch in the basement with my computer … all day long.

With all the free time I had on Saturday, I thought I would upgrade our website to the latest version of software. As I started the task, I knew it was not going to be easy to do. But I did have the time, so I thought I’d go for it.

… And boy, did I! Along the way, I learned lots – more than I had ever wanted to know about software and the internet. I may be scarred for life now.

There were a couple of times during the day that I crashed our website and was not sure if I could get it back. I feared I would have to rebuild the website from scratch.

I read all kinds of horror stories about upgrading websites that really should have convinced me that I should have just left it alone, but no I kept going.

It may have been my dad’s voice in my head saying, “Finish what you start”. I wanted to go for a bike ride but I had to finish the upgrade. This compulsion goes back to when I was a kid and colouring in a colouring book …

One time I started colouring a picture and then half way through got bored and turned the page to start a new one. My dad said to me “Finish the one you started.” Those words got stuck in the part of my brain that makes decisions and now I have to finish what I start.

All day I kept asking questions via google search, and I had to reframe those questions over and over to get the answers I was looking for. I had to comb through useless information to get the nuggets of helpful suggestions.

I had to take some risks, because instructions were not that clear. I failed several times before I was successful. And it was the littlest things that brought the results I wanted. After hours of frustration, I found someone who had a similar problem, and the solution was to put an “@” at the beginning of line 1411 in some file.

It worked … it was 9:30 pm.

Even though it was a gorgeous day, and I could have gone biking, could have done a million things – even cutting the grass looked more exciting that day! – still, satisfaction marked my day.

Here’s the thing: There are a lot of difficult things we would rather put off, not deal with, turn a blind eye to. But if you will keep seeking God about these difficult issues or personal growth areas, not ignoring them, but persevering by continually bringing them to God, when God brings that answer, in the end, you will have as much satisfaction as when you do something enjoyable.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What have you stuck with in order to see it finished?  Leave your comment below.