A Commitment Move

The idea of commitment seems to be everywhere lately, which is one way I start to pay attention.  You hear something once: it sounds good, you try to remember (but probably forget) and you continue as normal.  You hear something twice: your ears perk a bit, you remember the last time you heard it and know it is something that is making an impression, but you may still forget it again soon after you hear it.  But when you start to hear, read, and see the same general message consistently over and over and find it everywhere you start to wonder if God is trying to tell you something.

And so that is the case for commitment with me lately.  I find it in most reading I am doing (even random academic reading which is quite interesting), hear it in lectures or talks, see it in various aspects of life and have, consequently, talked a lot about it with Luke.  The idea is that often we want a guarantee that something will happen before we commit to it.

For me, this has surfaced within my academic writing.  I want to know where I am going before I write, and yet, often this prevents me from being fully able to write what I would like to.  Instead, I am finding I need to fully commit to the writing, to the project, to the degree before it starts to pour out.  A man named Patrick Dunleavy writes about this concept:

"You will very rarely work out what you think first, and then just write it down.  Normally the act of committing words to screen (or pen to paper) will make an important contribution to your working out what it is that you do think.  In other words, the act of writing may often be constitutive of your thinking.  Left to ourselves we can all of us keep conflicting ideas in play almost indefinitely, selectively paying attention to what fits our needs of the moment and ignoring the tensions with what we said or thought yesterday, or the day before that.  Writing things down in a systematic way is an act of commitment, a decision to firm up and crystallize what we think, to prevent this constant reprocessing and reconfiguring."

This idea that Dunleavy talks about can also be applied to most everything beyond writing.  Commitment, in many ways, offers freedom to a scenario.  If you have committed to something or someone then you know if any hard times pass your way the question is not if you will make it through it, it is how you will make it through.  So if there is a dream or a calling that has been bumbling around, the surest way to find freedom in pursuing it is to commit to it.  The questions start to change from whether or not you will be able to do something but how you will do it and how long it will take. 

I am discovering how tempting it can be to give up on something when it starts to take awhile to complete or it didn't work out the way you thought it would, but how this giving up (and often it can be a chronic problem) is something that prevents us from experiencing freedom and joy.  Committing to something is hard (ask anyone who considers themselves to be in a committed marriage!), but the fulfillment and joy that comes from knowing you will find a way to make it through the tough times is worth every aspect of that hardness when push comes to shove.  And in many ways, when the commitment is applied to a dream or a calling it frees us to grow into what God desires us to become: mature, loving followers who obey what He desires of us.

So here are some fun quotes to hammer the point home:


 "The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand." ~Vince Lombardi

"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it - but all that had gone before." ~Jacob Riis

"Bear in mind, if you are going to amount to anything, that your success does not depend upon the brilliancy and the impetuosity with which you take hold, but upon the ever lasting and sanctified buldoggedness with which you hang on after you have taken hold." ~Dr. A. B. Meldrum

And now, if you are eager to have a dose of inspiration about how your voice matters so very much then I recommend you watch the following and listen to the words.  It is a song by Matthew West called "Something to Say". 

Blessings and many wishes for you to commit to what God has called you to say, do and be.