The Old Man Who Would Not Quit

In Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the aged fisherman Santiago has gone eighty-four days without a catch. The other fishermen pity him. His apprentice's parents have forced the boy to fish on a luckier boat. Yet every morning, Santiago rows out again.

When he finally hooks a massive marlin, the struggle lasts three days. The line cuts his hands raw. His back cramps. He has no food, little water, and no one to help him. At his lowest point, he whispers to himself, "I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures."

Santiago eventually loses the marlin to sharks on the journey home — he arrives with nothing but a skeleton lashed to his boat. By the world's measure, he failed. But Hemingway's point is unmistakable: the old man was never defeated, because he never stopped trying.

The apostle Paul understood this kind of perseverance. "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair" (2 Corinthians 4:8). The Christian life does not promise that every battle will end in visible victory. Sometimes we row home with empty boats. But the God who calls us to faithfulness measures something different than the scoreboard does. He measures whether we kept rowing.

And beloved, the One who calls you out onto the water each morning rows with you.