Give It Up!

When my youngest son was in high school, I wanted to build something to have a father-son experience.  I got this idea of building a boat.  So, I bought three sheets of marine plywood, several 2X4’s and boxes of different sizes of screws.  “This will be fun,” I said to my son and to myself.  But I didn’t have boat-building experience nor a plan.  Days dragged on and the boat became MY boat project.  My son was nowhere to be found.  I needed to seal it with water-tight paint that kept peeling off.  One side split and I had to keep adding wood supports and screws to hold it together.  When it was almost finished, I slid it off the sawhorses, but it was too heavy for me to move and too long to fit into the back of my truck.  The excitement of the project soon failed, and days dragged into weeks, and weeks dragged into months.  My son graduated from high school, went off to college, and the boat was still in the back yard … filled with water and mosquito larvae.  I devised a method of turning it upside down similar to the Egyptians building the pyramids.  Every time I looked out the back door, my boat was looking back, mocking me.  Solomon had it right in Ecclesiastes 7:8, “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.”  It is much easier to start a project than to finish a project.  Two years later, I used a circular saw to cut my boat into manageable pieces and throw it into the church dumpster.  Now that you are laughing, have you had a project that turned out to be a failure?  Hey, give it over to the dear Lord, get out your saw, and let it go.