DILIGENCE — "BE ABOUT IT"

"If you wanna be somebody, you wanna go somewhere, you better wake up and pay attention." This is a memorable line from the movie Sister Act 2. It was delivered by Whoopi Goldberg as Sister Mary Clarence, a Vegas lounge singer turned fake Catholic nun/ high school music teacher. She's addressing her hooligan inner-city students, who all just happen to have enormous musical talent. In the movie, the class turns her off-the-cuff admonishment into a catchy pop tune. The hook in this movie is that this improbable group of teenagers — led by their even more improbable teacher — actually wakes up and pays attention, wins a choir competition, and saves their school. The story illustrates how, if you harness your talent and apply yourself, you can overcome circumstances and be successful. The students, though talented, appeared to be going nowhere until Sister Mary Clarence gets them to pay attention to their gifts and apply themselves. They set a goal — winning the choir competition — practice, and overcome obstacles to reach success. They worked diligently to win the competition.

Over the years that I've spent working on this book, I've had to deal with a couple of things that made it difficult to complete. Aside from the fact that I'd never written a book before, the main complication has been the amount of time that it took. I'd been thinking about this book for a long time, but actually sitting down and putting this all into words has been more than a notion. Because of that, the process has been marked by starts, stops, and restarts. It seems like once I got a little momentum, life sidetracked me. Though I intended to get right back to it, I would go weeks without writing a word. It usually took deliberate planning and a conscientious effort to resume this project. But because you are reading this, you know that, ultimately, I completed what I started.

The quality that I had to put into practice in my own life and in the process of writing this book is the first principle that Peter mentions in this system: diligence.

In 2 Peter 1:5, he instructs us to "make every effort to add to your faith." In other translations, the phrase "make every effort" is substituted with the phrase "applying all diligence." Diligence means to give attention and care to something. In a legal sense, we speak of "due diligence," which means the attention and care that is required. So to be diligent means to maintain attention to something to make sure you are doing what is necessary. Sister Mary Clarence implored her students to wake up and pay attention. Where I'm from, we had a phrase that encouraged people to be diligent about pursuing their expressed plans. "Don't talk about it. Be about it."

In the book of Romans, Paul states that diligence is the critical quality for exercising leadership (Romans 12:8). He says leaders should govern "diligently." This gives a good illustration of what diligence means. In a sense, it also means to be serious about something. If you are going to do it, then you have to be serious about it! You have to be about it! Imagine a leader of an organization or government who lacks diligence. He or she would fail to give attention to the organization, and before long, there would be a noticeable decline in the effectiveness of that organization. If the leader is "asleep at the wheel," as the saying goes, then people under him or her would likely become lax in their responsibilities as well. The same is true of governing ourselves. If we are not diligent in managing our own lives, we become lax in the responsibilities we have. Perhaps this is what Solomon meant when he said, "Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life" (Proverbs 4:23).

Jesus Christ displayed just how diligent and serious He was at the age of twelve. Luke tells a story of His family's annual trip to Jerusalem for the Passover feast. When the rest of the family left to return home, young Jesus stayed behind in the temple, listening to the discussions, asking questions, and answering questions from the Jewish teachers. He was there for four days before His family returned for Him. When they finally found Him, his mother asked Him why He'd caused them such anxiety. His response was "I must be about my Father's business" (Luke 2: 49, KJV). Although we are tempted to think that Jesus had all knowledge and wisdom at birth, this shows that He was diligent about learning and preparing for His later ministry. Scripture supports this view in verse 52. "And Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men." When it came to ministry, Jesus showed early on that He was going to be about it.

Peter lists diligence first of the principles, but he doesn't exactly say it's part of the list. Instead, he says, "apply all diligence" to cultivating these qualities. Diligence is necessary to make the system work. The reason that's true is because we have a tendency to get distracted, especially when it comes to doing something that takes a long time. Often it is easier to do things that can be completed in one sitting, but if we have to drop it and pick it up again later, it is more difficult to finish. For example, there are lots of people who have yet to earn a college degree that they started years ago. Once you get out of the swing of going to class and doing homework, it's hard to get back into it again. It's like that with most things that require multiple efforts. Once you stop doing it, it's harder to get going again. So to complete a difficult undertaking, you have to get serious and be about it.

Thinking of diligence as being serious about something also highlights its necessity. We really only maintain the effort and focus on something over an extended period of time if we are serious about it. I can't count the number of things that I started doing on a whim, only to conclude fairly quickly that I'm not really that serious about it. For example, because I love music, I have always dreamed of playing an instrument. In junior high school, I played the bass horn, which most people call a tuba. I was pretty good at it too. But since playing the tuba wasn't considered cool, I stopped playing in high school. Nevertheless, my interest in playing an instrument hasn't waned. As an adult, I have actually purchased a keyboard, a full drum set, and not long ago, I talked my kids into buying me a guitar for Christmas. Unfortunately, I still can't actually play any of them. The truth is I was never serious about learning to play any of those instruments.

So for something this important, Peter wanted to make sure to start by saying we must be diligent; we must be serious about developing these qualities and maintaining focus. If you are going to pursue becoming like Christ, you have to "be about it!"

In fact, if you want to accomplish anything that is worth accomplishing, you'd better "be about it!" Diligence is one of the qualities that has a fairly obvious universal application. Unfortunately, it is also one that too many of us neglect. Most of us desire to accomplish something great. Few people set out to be average. But often the difference between merely dreaming and actually realizing our dreams is diligence. Being great requires more than talent; it requires diligence. Malcolm Gladwell illustrates this in his 2008 book, Outliers.

In his book, Gladwell discusses some fascinating theories about what extraordinary achievement can be attributed to. He cites studies of experts and top performers in areas like computer science, basketball, and fiction writing to understand what they have in common. Gladwell reports that one of the key factors is that those who have become experts at something have typically practiced their craft much more than others. He notes,

The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

That's ten thousand hours of practice at a specific skill. When you consider all of the other things we have to do in life — like sleep and work — ten thousand hours spent on one thing is an awful lot of time. According to Gladwell, Bill Gates started computer programming in the eighth grade. Over the next few years, he and some friends spent an enormous amount of time programming. They borrowed time on mainframe computers in the evenings and on weekends. In the summer, they spent as much as eight hours a day, seven days a week, on it. By the time he was a senior in high school, he had convinced his school to let him spend the entire spring semester on an independent study program writing computer code for a local company. When he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, he had spent well over ten thousand hours practicing his craft.

This is characteristic of those we consider geniuses. It is said that Leonardo da Vinci, who is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time — and was the creator of the Mona Lisa — once drew a human hand one thousand times in an effort to perfect it. Think about the stories of young athletes pounding a basketball for hours at a time and then becoming an NBA player. Or consider the young musician who spends all her spare time playing her instrument and then growing up to be a musical genius. It takes more than just talent to be great at something. It also takes the diligence to actually do it, day after day, week after week, and year after year. You have to be about it! Whether you want to be a doctor, an NBA player, or a writer, you have to get serious and apply yourself — you have to be about it!

Food for Thought

And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end.

— Hebrews 6:11

But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.

— Hebrews 11:6

He who diligently seeks good seeks favor.

— Proverbs 11:27, NASB

Only give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently, so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen and they do not depart from your heart all the days of your life; but make them known to your sons and your grandsons.

— Deuteronomy 4:9

Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth. He who gathers crops in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son.

-Proverbs 10:4-5, NIV

If a man is called to be a street-sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, "Here lived a great street-sweeper who did his job well."

— Martin Luther King Jr.

The leading rule for a man of every calling is diligence; never put offuntil tomorrow what you can do today.

— Abraham Lincoln

FAITH — "YOU MUST BELIEVE"

In the spring of 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began an organized campaign of demonstrations and boycotts designed to break the stranglehold of racial discrimination in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Led by the local chapter's leader, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and national president Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., SCLC was attempting to strike a mortal wound to the discriminatory system called Jim Crow by protesting in what was then considered the most segregated city in America. The direct but nonviolent protests were meant to pressure the city government and local businesses to the negotiation table as well as bring media attention to the plight of black Americans in Birmingham. SCLC and Dr. King had been successful leading nonviolent protests and a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. However, they had failed to make significant gains in subsequent campaigns in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962. Furthermore, sit-ins and freedom rides led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were achieving some success, while Dr. King's profile was losing some luster. The SCLC and Dr. King were in a watershed moment in 1963. The government leaders in Albany, Georgia, had been successful against the protest movement by using legal maneuvers, as well as painting Dr. King and SCLC as outsiders who were bent on upsetting what they considered their genteel way of life.

It was then that Dr. King and SCLC trained their sights on Birmingham and their blatantly racist Police Commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor. However, the protesters met with much the same tactics in Birmingham as they had in Albany. The city leaders responded with clever tactics of their own. They obtained a court injunction to stop the marches, making them illegal. As they arrested the protesters by the hundreds, they also sought to cut off their financial lifelines by refusing to accept bonds from the bail bondsman used by SCLC, claiming that he did not have the requisite assets to cover bail for so many people. When Dr. King and other senior leaders of the movement chose to buoy the spirits of the protesters by physically joining the marches, they did so with little confidence that they would be able to make bail. Thus, on April 12, 1963, Dr. King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, and was immediately put into solitary confinement. He would later write of the fear and despair he felt in that dark cell, unable to even get word to his pregnant wife, Coretta, that he was okay.

But one of the hardest blows Dr. King would receive in that Birmingham jail cell would come when someone slipped him a copy of the next day's newspaper. In it he read a full-page ad, signed by a group of influential Birmingham clergymen, opposing the marches. In their letter, "A Call for Unity," these clergymen commended the government for its calm handling of the demonstrations, which they deemed both unwise and untimely. Further, they openly implied that the SCLC tactics incited hatred and violence. In essence, some of his brothers in the gospel (as well as a rabbi) accused Dr. King of causing violence and hatred. In response, using the margins of the same newspaper, Dr. King wrote what came to be published as his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." In the letter, Dr. King brilliantly laid out the case for why the demonstrations were necessary and refuted every argument leveled at him using perfect logic, reasoned counter arguments, and powerful illustrations. And to completely dismiss his religious detractors, Dr. King was crystal clear in explaining why, in the face of such insidious opposition, he pressed on. He wrote, "If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands." Dr. King overcame because he believed he would. He believed that victory was inevitable. He overcame because he had faith.

As Christians, our goal of becoming like Christ begins with faith. We strive to be like Christ because we believe in Him. But an important question is — what do we believe about Him? Let's look at it another way. If you consider the story of Jesus of Nazareth and just look on the surface, you may not find a lot of reasons to imitate Him. Here are some of the facts. He was a Hebrew carpenter who lived a couple thousand years ago in Palestine, which, at the time, was under Roman occupation. He lived a relatively short life on earth and, during the few years He did live, He seemed to have a death wish. He never married and had no children. He quit his job to roam around the countryside where, even though He helped lots of people and even performed miracles, at the end of His life he had very little to show for it. He apparently had no house of His own — He stayed with relatives and friends. His preaching caused the religious officials to charge Him with blasphemy against God, and He was ultimately executed at the age of thirty-three with only a handful of relatives and friends at His side. They couldn't even afford to purchase a tomb to bury Him.