Okay. This here commercial is fer my good buds Phil and Jen. I’m a still huntin’ down the udder ones.

Did you miss Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV or Part V?

Edgemont nights were quiet and predictable. Mr. Turner always closed the barber shop at 4:30 in the afternoon so that he’d have time to stop by Lynn’s Deli to get meat for supper before she shut her place down at five. The one grocery store in town locked its doors promptly at 8:00 pm and the only place remotely in operation after nine was the police station which also doubled as the fire station. Bart Stiller had the dubious honor of being the Edgemont Fire and Police Chief, and he usually headed home around ten-thirty. He’d stay just long enough to finish up the paperwork or to make sure the police car and fire engine were ready for the next day. It was not an arduous task, especially since neither had seen emergency use in a number of years. That, however, is what made Edgemont so nice. It was quiet and predictable, and the residents liked it that way. Maybe that’s why they didn’t take too kindly to Billy. He was anything but quiet and predictable.

Billy put down the TV dinner and sat back in the easy chair. It was going on nine and his mother still wasn’t home. The plant had been closed well over an hour and he was starting to worry. He went through all the places that she could have been, calling them and asking if she had been there. Nobody in Edgemont had seen her since she’d left the textile plant at 5:40 pm. She had called Billy at five, worked an extra 40 minutes of overtime, and then what? Where had she been the last three hours? More importantly, where was she now?

Tomorrow: Courage – Part VII

Philippians 1:6
…being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

You know those Type A people who are always setting goals and then completing them well ahead of schedule while multitasking the cleaning out of the garage and the reading of 2 novels simultaneously? I’m not that guy. I’m close to Type A, if you add the 2 Ds after it. In fact, the funny thing about my writing is that I love really long sentences which anybody reading who is also Type ADD would never even get through in one try. More than likely, you Type ADD people have already started this evotion over a couple of times, and you Type A people have finished reading it even before I finished writing it.

The verse above always cracks me up because it is all the proof I need to be forever reminded that I am not God, because it’s all I can do to finish reading books, let alone finish some beautiful, spiritual re-creating in a soul. Man, if your salvation hinged on my ability to finish something I’ve started, you are in serious trouble.

I guess all this thinking about goal-setting and goal-completing is fresh on my mind because I am now one-third of the way to completing my training for a 5K, and every day gets harder to complete. Anyone who knows me already knows how much I hate running, but this is getting seriously ridiculous. Everything in me is screaming at me to just quit. I know, though, that it is not the nature of God to quit, and it cannot be my nature, either. Perseverance, whether in reading a book, running a race, or following Jesus, is evidence of the character of God in us, because He perseveres, too, in the work He has begun in us.

I’m glad, aren’t you?