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The Blessing of Perseverance by Vernie Lynn DeMille

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Have you ever really watched a flower grow? Have you seen the first leaves spring from the soil and reach up to the sun? I confess I never have. It always seems to happen when my back is turned.

While I was busy one morning, hanging laundry on the line, my lilacs were opening up to full bloom. I didn’t watch it happen but the fragrance washed over me while I was occupied with my work and in that small instance I was surprised by joy.

That is the blessing of perseverance. We do not plant our seeds, prune our roses, and weed our beds just so that we can then sit back, twiddle our thumbs and fret over when the harvest will arrive.

True perseverance is jumping up and getting to work. It is doing the hundred other things that out of necessity must fill our days. It is sowing the seed and going on with the work that must be done. It is pushing past worry with work and finding in little moments the treasure of joy.

How delightful it is to be surprised by the blossoms of a flower you have lovingly tended and left to grow as you have trained it. Perseverance is patience, not apathy; faith, not forgetfulness; work, not worry. Longfellow said it best, we must “learn to labor and to wait.”

The reward of a garden is not instant. It takes many years to see the harvest from a peach sapling and yet we plant anyway. We prune and train the young branches of a tree from which we may never harvest any fruit. It is perseverance that drives us on; the indomitable belief that we sow not only for ourselves but for our children and for the whole Earth.

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