Do you remember when you were a kid on the playground and things weren’t going your way, maybe you would walk away from the game the group was playing only to hear someone yell out, “Quitter?”

Did you ever take up an instrument that someone had made look easy and fun to play (because they had practiced) only to want to quit when your parents made you practice, except you couldn’t quit because when they bought you the instrument you had to promise them that you wouldn’t quit for a year?

As a kid, did you ever join an athletic team during the energetic days of Spring, promising that you’d play all season, only to find that practicing in the overbearingly dusty and hot days of summer was suddenly more work than play. But you grind onward because you don’t want to be a quitter.

Refusing to quit is ingrained in the American psyche. It’s part of what makes us strong as people and collectively as a country. I remember hearing a speaker deliver Churchhill’s admonition when I was a teen-ager “Never. Never. Never. Give up!” And I resolved then and there that I was tough, and I was strong, and I had character, and I had constitution, and I could win on perseverance alone. I would never give up.

I remember being a 23-year-old young man who wanted to start a church only to hear an older and supposedly wiser pastor say “You can’t succeed in starting a church out in that part of town. You aren’t educated enough. You aren’t old enough. You don’t have enough money. You’ll fail.” I was incensed and inflamed by my mentor’s words and I impetuously resolved to prove him wrong. There were 964 people in services my last Easter in that church seven years later. I succeeded, but the personal cost was great and the emotional crash came hard.

The virtue of persistence must be balanced with the wisdom of knowing when to say “enough.” Quitting to0 early may be a sin, but there is no sin in quitting.

Coming in the next post: When to Be a Quitter