They say there are two kinds of people in this world: starters and finishers. Starters get a thrill out of starting new things; they love planning to start new things, they love researching what it will take to start these new things, and they love buying the needed items for their new venture—most of all they love starting the new thing! Because starters get a thrill out of starting new things they tend to start a lot of new things but often have a hard time completing any one thing.
Finishers on the other hand, love to finish things; they hate having a bunch of loose ends. They want to start a task and see it through to completion. I’ve heard that finishers are the ones who finish their body lotion down to the last drop and take great pleasure in having used every bit of lotion in that bottle, whereas if you look in the cabinet of a starter they have about 50 bottles with just one or two pumps of lotion missing!
I am a starter. Talk about starting something new and I am all excited about it! I want to quit what I’m working on and go all in on the next thing … until, of course, the next new thing arises! I wish I was a finisher. At least I am aware of this tendency so I can work to do better at finishing what I start, but my natural inclination is to start all the new things, and maybe finish one or two of them.
On the other hand, I think Paul was a finisher. The other day I was reading my bible and I was reading Acts 14 where Paul and Barnabas were in Lystra and some of the Jews followed them there from Antioch and Iconium where Paul and Barnabas had just been. The Jews started to stone Paul, driving him out of the city and leaving him for dead as they returned to the city. After they leave, Paul drags himself up, dusts himself off and heads back into the city- definitely not something any starter would want to do! But here’s the thing that really got me: the Bible says Paul and Barnabas then left the next day! The next day!! If I had been run out of a city and I had planned to leave the next day I would say, “Well I almost died, they ran me off leaving me just shy of the amount of time I was going to be there, I think that’s good enough!” Meanwhile what I’d be wanting to do is to call down curses on the people who tried to kill me- but this is a good illustration of why I am not Paul.
God calls each of us to certain tasks in this life. I believe what He calls us to is not half as important as how we go about doing what He has called us to. “The end of something is better than the beginning,” we are told in Ecclesiastes 7:8. But that is the hard part—especially for us starters! We need to cultivate the grit and perseverance to stick with something and follow through with it. We need to make sure that we are cultivating Paul-like follow through. The kind of perseverance where, even if we really, really don’t want to do the thing, we do it anyway because we know God has called us to it and how we follow through with the task, be it big or small, is one of the best ways we can honor Him.