Sticking

About three thousand years ago, a man purported to be the wisest man who ever lived, a Hebrew king named Solomon wrote this couplet in the Hebrew Scriptures book of Ecclesiastes:

The end of the matter is better than the beginning,
And patience is better than pride.

One of the things my Moody Bible Institute education taught me was that in Hebrew literature, the two lines of a couplet illuminate each other by addressing underlying principles in a parallel way. In this couplet, “The end of the matter” is parallel to “patience,” and “the beginning” of the matter is parallel to “pride.” As I reflect on what is happening here in Liberia, and with so many efforts to help Liberians help themselves, Solomon’s words come back to me over and over.

Everywhere in Liberia, large international NGOs have been initiating great sounding projects to help Liberians. USAID, Medecins Sans Frontieres, World Vision, World Food Programme, Catholic Relief Services, World Health Organization, and so many others are here, and all have started big, top-down interventions. But when these organizations pull out with their funding—and they will-- what will happen to their great programs then? If history is any indicator, the programs and the impact will fade away, and the big NGOs will not look back, because they will be engaged somewhere else. These big organizations are much better at starting projects than finishing them.

I also think of American Christians like myself. We are full of ourselves and our noble projects. We get charged and excited about efforts designed to help others, but when the progress inevitably slows, we become frustrated or simply bored. We like the quick fix, and in our culturally bound pride, we expect things to be fixed quickly. We too often “begin matters” out of an inflated sense of our ability to make an impact, but when the reality of the situation presents itself and progress slows, we find ourselves becoming impatient. We label the project “unfixable,” and allow ourselves to get distracted by the next great project. Reframing a good effort as “unworkable” or “a poor allocation of recourses” allows us to justify abandoning it. That I think is what Solomon was referring to when he said “The end of the matter is better than the beginning,” because finishing a project or a work well requires the virtue of patience. Finishing requires character. Any prideful fool can start something. The patient soul, the wise soul, sticks around to see the finish.

In Liberia, the great work ahead of us is called peacebuilding. Whether we are counseling torture survivors, developing curricula, digging wells, helping young businesses grow, or contributing from afar, we are engaged in peace and justice work. However, the problems here are macro, complex, and interdependent. Those of us who have “begun the matter” in this war weary country must keep in mind the progress will be slow, incremental, and at times almost imperceptibly slow. The words of Solomon are like a drumbeat in my mind, urging me to stay the course.

The end of the matter is better than the beginning,
And patience is better than pride.

With God’s help, pulling together, we may see the “end of the matter” in Liberia.