I’ve been thinking a lot about the final 5%; about not letting up; about pushing through till the end; about playing hard ’til the buzzer sounds.

It’s easy to complete 10 of your 12 reps on the weights and think “Aw, I lifted today. That’s good enough.”

It’s easy to walk 2 1/2 of your three miles of exercise and think “Aw, that’s enough.”

It’s easy to think that your spouse or kids or co-workers know you love them so there’s no need to tell them.

When you are winning in the athletic contest or the game of business, it’s tempting to ease up—to relax and coast until the buzzer sounds, and that’s when your competitor overtakes you and you lose the game.

It’s all about the final 5%.

When I was a kid playing baseball my coaches always made a big deal about running out first base even though it was obvious you were about to be thrown out. You never know when the first baseman is going to drop the ball; Likely when he thinks to himself “aw, this is easy. We got him.” So he slacks, doesn’t bear down, fails to focus, gets careless, drops the ball, and misses the easy out. He didn’t give it the final 5%.

Success is often about persistence—hanging on just a little bit longer than everyone else. Then you win the game and get all the marbles because everyone else quit and went home. They were ninety-five-percenters.

I want to be the guy who gives the final 5%, and get’s the 100% for doing so. That’s the kind of people I want on my team, and in my tribe. Those are the people who win.

In the midst of an 80% culture (or 60%, or whatever it really is out there) you and I can excel as champions if we’ll learn to be hundred-percenters. But even excellent people like us are tempted to pull up short and coast, and it jeopardizes us.

How are you doing with the final 5%?

I just read that the Taliban in Afghanistan executed a seven year old boy for being a spy. He may have done some that looked spy-like, but he’s no spy. At most he was the agent of an adult; or maybe just a kid looking for a bug, or trailing a kitty cat. He was seven years old—that’s a first or second grader. Bring him to my house and give him hugs, birthday cake, and a puppy dog and he’s got hope and a future.

There is a philosophy in our culture today that says the way you deal with religious thugs–animals really—who did this is to be kind to them. Explain to them that it was wrong. Educate them. Befriend them. Socialize them. Give them therapy. Negotiate. Ask them not to do it again.

That’s weak thinking.

We need to realize what we’ve been given—in this case—the ability to know evil when we see it. The solution to evil isn’t repression, it’s annihilation. Evil in me, or evil in you—kill it before it hurts someone. And when that evil arises to a certain level—you’ll probably know when it’s reached that point, certainly in this case it had—-you literally kill that evil in the same manner that you would a rabid dog attacking a baby—your baby—in its stroller.

The earth needs to be emptied of people who do things like this. It’s the responsibility of good men and women in civilized society to stop evil in its tracks. These people need to be annihilated; to disappear from the face of the planet. To borrow the notion of the soldier who when asked what he did in the military said “I arrange appointments between people and God”—-the date of their judgment needs to be accelerated.

The only thing more enraging than hearing about this, is when I hear weak thinkers put forth the notion of philosophical egalitarianism that says cultures, philosophies, and religions that promote such behavior should be on an equal footing with Judeo-Christian thinking. No rational, thinking person can embrace that philosophy. It’s wrong!

Of course, I am writing this from the comfort and security of a country where it it would have been perfectly OK to have killed this boy a few days before he came from his mother’s womb. So, maybe we aren’t that much different than the Taliban?

Hurts doesn’t it.

Jesus loved and defended children. In one case He said it would be better for a millstone to be hung around their neck than for someone to bring harm to a child. That’s pretty graphic language. Annihilation language.

I’m not advocating terrorizing abortion clinics or physicians in the manner of Scott Roeder who murdered a physician in a church in Kansas a few months back. I’m just expressing my outrage at the Taliban and then observing that a not totally dissimilar behavior is perfectly acceptable in our culture. That seems wrong to me.

Jesus is about life. He’s in the life giving business. Life for babies in America. Life for seven year old boys in Afghanistan. Even life for Taliban soldiers. But when you reject his life and rain death up that life He gives…….that’s where good men and women of strong mind and character must stop evil in its tracks. The law in my country stands wrongly in the way of this matter in America. We need to work to change that. And in the wild, wild, east that is Afghanistan where there’s little law and mostly tribal code, we need to wipe out people who hang little boys.