Faithful Over a Few Things…

In the long process of preparation young people sometimes weary along the way. They become  impatient or discouraged, and give up, and settle for something less than the best they could be.

It is a trait of youth to be restless with routine with the daily doing of what has to be done-to want to become what they want to become quickly, to want to start unrealistically near the top. But the pursuit of excellence is a long and patient process; there is no quick or easy way of acquiring knowledge, skills, judgment, quality-credentials. Competence and experience do not come quickly.

Even those who seem to have arrived usually spend much of their time in tedious routine, repetition, in the practice and performance of a daily round of duty. A violinist or pianist may be before his audience for only a relatively few minutes, and receive applause for only a few seconds. And for those few minutes of playing and those few seconds of applause there are uncounted hours of painstaking effort-of the drudgery of doing over and over again the practice that precedes performance.

Always there is the process of preparation-the learning, the doing, the willingness to work, the willingness to take responsibility, the willingness to follow through.

In the parable of the talents the Master said, ‘Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things.” We have to begin, we have to learn, we have to know; we have to do the lesser things before we can be trusted with the larger ones. This is a basic law of life.

There is much patience and preparation, much tedious repetition and routine, in the lives of all of us, and there is no short cut to excellence, to competence-or to the solid values of time or the limitless opportunities of eternity.

If “thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many.”