I Quit

Between the Roots has me thinking a lot about quitting. Yesterday at church, one of our elders was preaching. He is not really a guest preacher. He is part of our church, preaches a couple of times a year, and works as a chaplain at the correctional facility. This was not his first time standing in front of a congregation, but something was off. The scripture reader came up and read the passage that had been prepared. Then the preacher followed and basically said, “And now here is today’s real passage.” What followed were a few confusing and frustrated minutes as he tried to explain why he was going in a different direction. I was trying to follow what he was saying, but the frustration was already there, and I am pretty sure everyone at that 9 a.m. service could feel it. As he reached the end of the message, the worship team did not come back out when he expected them to. He called the communion servers forward, but nobody came. For a moment he was just standing there with hundreds of eyes on him, and you could tell he did not know what was supposed to happen next. Eventually everyone came forward and took their places. He went over and checked his computer, probably wondering whether he had made the mistake, then paced a little, gathered himself, and made it through communion. After the final worship song, he did not notice the lead vocalist trying to get him to come back up, and when he finally realized what was happening, he stumbled through the benediction. It was uncomfortable to watch, but I had an advantage most people at that service did not. I was there again at 11. Same preacher, same message, same church, but this time everything ran smoothly. This time I actually enjoyed the message, and that difference stayed with me. Today I started thinking about the frustration I saw yesterday morning, and then I started looking at my own. How many things have I quit because I became frustrated? Projects, jobs, friendships, family, things I enjoyed until they stopped being easy, and things I wanted to learn until I reached the part I could not figure out. Looking back, frustration has taken a lot of things I once enjoyed, and sometimes I think I simply let it. Even my faith could have been one of them. There have been times when I have opened the Bible and read something I simply did not understand. There have been passages that confused me, questions I could not answer, and moments when what I was reading did not seem to fit with what I thought I already knew. I could have closed the Bible and left it there, then maybe stopped opening it, stopped asking questions, stopped going to church, and eventually walked away from God altogether. Not because I stopped believing, but because I became frustrated trying to understand. God never told me I had to understand everything the first time. Sometimes I need to read it again. Sometimes I need to pray about it, ask someone, study it a little deeper, or admit that I simply do not know yet. Faith does not disappear because I am confused, and God does not leave because I am frustrated. Yesterday reminded me of that. At 9 a.m., everything seemed to fight against the message. At 11 a.m., the same message landed completely differently. What if the preacher had decided after the first service that he was done? What if he had let one frustrating service become the final outcome? There would never have been the second one. That made me wonder how many things in my own life never got their second service. How many projects needed one more attempt, how many conversations needed another try, how many ideas needed another version, and how many times I let frustration convince me that something was finished when it really was not. I know frustration is not going anywhere. There will still be moments when something refuses to work, moments when the idea is sitting right on the tip of my tongue and I cannot quite get it out, and times when I know exactly what I want to create but AI hands me some distant cousin of the idea I had in my head. There will still be projects that fight back, people I do not understand, Bible passages I have to read more than once, and plans that fall apart. So today, I quit. I am not quitting frustration because I doubt I could even if I wanted to. I am quitting letting frustration become the outcome. I quit letting one bad attempt decide that the whole thing was a failure. I quit letting confusion decide that something is not worth understanding, and I quit letting one difficult moment decide whether something I once enjoyed is suddenly worthless. Some things in my life probably did need quitting, but I wonder how many others simply needed another try. Yesterday, the message needed another service. Maybe sometimes I do too. So Between the Roots, I quit. I quit letting frustration have the last word.