Finish What You Start–The True Glory

Thursday, April 6th, 2017     by Debra DuPree Williams     Start the Conversation

by Debra DuPree Williams @DDuPreeWilliams


 
Sunset at Indian Rocks Beach, Florida,  2011

My sister Bobbie and I are the queens of unfinished projects. I cannot begin to tell you how many times one or the other of us has begun a project of one kind or another and abandoned it for yet another project, promising to get back to it later. You know how that goes. Later never comes. There is always something else out there that seems to be more fun or appealing on any given day.

Unfinished
Case in point, my eldest son and his wife celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary in March. Before they even said their I dos, I purchased the perfect fabrics and chose just the right design to make a lovely wedding quilt for them. It was going to be totally hand-sewn with each square having an appliqued design with deep meaning for them. I got the top almost finished and I hated it. It wasn’t so much the design and the work I had done, I’m actually a decent quilter. But the colors I had chosen were not the ones they truly loved. I took it apart and intended to change the colors and remake all those hand-sewn squares. You know this story all too well. That quilt is still packed away, languishing among the many other quilting projects, including the bassoon/orchestra fabric for our professional bassoonist, son number two, and the un-quilted, pieced top for son number three. Forget son number four’s T-shirt quilt. His dad accidentally gave all those saved shirts to a charity as we moved from North Carolina back to Florida. Sigh.

My point is, we all start things and never get around to finishing them. Who knows why—perhaps laziness or boredom? But what does God have to say about those unfinished projects?

 Wisdom Then and Now
As a writer, have you finished what you started? Maybe you began a novel but you couldn’t get past the first few chapters. If not a novel, maybe it was a devotional or a poem. Only you know why you walked away, what your reasoning was. Believe me, I’ve probably used every excuse you could name.

At one of the many conferences I’ve attended in the past few years, Torry Martin was a keynote speaker. So many of us know and love Torry for his wit and wisdom, as well as for his God-given talents as an actor and writer. But I’ll never forget what he had to say one year.

 When we don’t finish that novel, devotional, poem, picture book, whatever it is, we’re denying God the glory He would have otherwise received by our work being completed. Think about that. We all know that if it isn’t finished, the public isn’t going to get to read it and reap the blessings our words would otherwise have had.

 When I heard Torry say those words, it brought to mind an anthem I heard for the first time in 1977. My Birmingham, Alabama church choir, Independent Presbyterian Church, was on a tour of England and Scotland. We had the privilege of attending a concert in Royal Albert Hall, commemorating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. The participating choirs were members of the Royal School of Church Music. Our choir was humbled to have been given honorary membership in this organization. The anthem was titled, “The True Glory”. It was set, in part, to a text by Sir Francis Drake, written four hundred and thirty years ago, April 27, 1587. The music was composed by Peter Aston. Click on “The True Glory” to see it on YouTube.


What about your unfinished work? Have you  considered that because you didn’t finish it that God is being denied His due Glory? What lives could be changed because of what you have to say? As my friend  Eva Marie Everson said in one of the best keynotes I have heard, “No one can take your place in the wall, if you don’t build (write) it, no one else will. No one can tell your story except you.”(See Nehemiah 2:20).

Debbie and Ken at IPC, Birmingham, AL, 1978

The True Glory

That unfinished quilt is in a box in a storage facility in North Carolina, but I will be retrieving it soon. I think it’s time I finished that wedding quilt. By the way, I was seven months pregnant with my first-born son as I sat in Royal Albert Hall and heard “The True Glory” for the first time. Oddly enough, Ken is now studying at Oxford University.

Do you have projects lying around, unfinished, waiting to give glory unto God? Go choose one. Challenge yourself to finish it and see what doors God opens for you.

Leave your comments here and tell us what project you feel led to finish.


TWEETABLE


No Comments

Comments are closed.