2 Thessalonians 3

Verse 5 "May the Lord direct your hearts into God's love and Christ's perseverance."

While I was working for Chrysler I recall a frank conversation I had with one of my supervisors. He told me that loyalty in corporate America is dead and if something better comes a long to take it. Commitment is a lot more rare than it used to be.

In many things we are a society of short-term commitments. I have been glued to the television and twitter for the past couple days as NFL teams sign free agents and cut some of their players. (The idea of cutting players is something I don't really understand. Apparently when you sign a guy to play football for 5 years, you can just cut him whenever you change your mind. But if he wants to go somewhere else he can't get out of the contract... doesn't seem really fair.)

But life is like that. Our work can let us go any time. Our spouse can change their mind and disappear. (I saw an article this week about a guy who left his house for lunch in 1979 and never came back. He was pronounced dead in 1986. They just found him in Las Vegas working as a dealer at a casino.)

It makes total sense that Paul would pray for perseverance, because we all need it. I googled perseverance to get the definition and instead I was drawn to the pictures that came up. Two of the pictures had people climbing a mountain... I think that defines perseverance right there. Continuing up the mountain of life through the steep/hard times.

It is easy to run away from our problems and it is easy to quit when we don't get our way. And sometimes it is the best thing for us.

But while work is temporary, God is eternal, and it's easy to lose faith when tragedy strikes. God has made promises to us, commitments that He will not break. Having Christ's perseverance means that we understand that God's promises mean more than the broken promises of humans. And no matter what happens in this life, nobody can take those promises away from us.

We just keep climbing because we know the top is worth it.