If At First You Don't Succeed...

I've been thinking a lot about persistence lately. I seem to have a pretty good dose of it, despite my lazy and procrastinating nature. But I have been thinking about it very much lately because of a few happenings in my life.

First, I put together a get-together of homeschool alumni through HomeschoolAlumni.org. "Dreamer" describes me well, but I've hardly ever had to actually go through with my dreams yet. So it has taken a lot of persistence on my behalf to help my parents organize it, as well as communicate with my guests. Some days, I'd really like to quit. "False alarm, y'all, I've decided not to have a get-together." Yet, I keep going. Day after day, level after level of excitement and nervousness. It will all come together, we will pull it off.

Secondly, and what feels like most importantly, is my novel. I usually do get mid-novel blues, which is when one feels very disappointed in themselves and the novel as well as discouraged enough to think about quitting. Basically, it's a period in which the author drags his or her feet in finishing it. So, I've got mid-novel blues. On top of that, the trial run for the word processor I was using to write it ran out. I started to switch the document over to OpenOffice, and discovered the page margins and sizes and whatnot are all different. That gives me a totally different page count. I know, I know, I should be going by word count, not page count, but I do things the hard way the first time around. Let me tell you, it's not paying off. But I finally got it close enough to make me happy, and started writing, after I had writer's block. I was feeling good about it and was eager to finish the chapter. However -- dumb me -- I forgot to save the document. While I was reading English Literature (and feeling good about getting caught up there), my laptop restarted because of updates. When it came back to life, I went through the recovery steps to get all my work back and it didn't give it to me. Read that? The recovery system recovered nothing. So I researched the problem to see what I could do to get all my beautiful writing back. Absolutely nothing. OpenOffice had a bug, and I needed to update if I wanted the recovery to work properly. Of course, that doesn't help the stuff I lost, so I updated and restarted today. I haven't had nearly half the success I had yesterday, but all my material will come back and maybe it'll be even better this time around. Unfortunately, I've been having my doubts.

Needless to say, I've perfected my sigh lately. All this keeps me looking to Him, ever constant, always recovering lost material. It's comforting to know that even if I quit, He never will. It also strengthens my resolve to keep going. Might take a little longer than I expected, but I will reach the finish line.