This week Louisa, our cosmetologist and hair stylist, kept her scissors snipping by giving haircuts to 6 family members. She’s good at what she does and has an endless string of clients because of it. The littler the customer, the more difficult the task, and she cut two preschoolers this week. Working with sharp blades on a moving target isn’t easy.

All of us spend a great deal of time on life-maintenance, just to stay even, and it’s not only haircuts. If we listed every daily stay-even chore we shouldn’t miss, the list would be arm’s length and would include everything from brushing teeth to changing diapers to walking dogs. Yet these things have to be done. If we fall behind, the consequences pile up much longer than an arm’s length, and we pay a high price for neglecting what would have been manageable on a daily basis.

The opposite is true, too. If we tend to something every day, with time our goals can be met. For example, Nate was a big reader but felt compelled to spend most of his reading time on professional work and 4-5 daily newspapers. But just before bed each night, he’d open what I called “pleasure reading,” books so thick we used to use them as booster chairs for young children. By reading several pages at a time, day in and day out, he completed hundreds of challenging books.

The simple truth of tending to our lives bit by bit, day by day, applies to our spiritual lives, too. If we’ve always wanted to read through the Bible but the project seems too daunting even to begin, we never will. But if we read even one page a day, in time we’ll finish.

In another example, if we crave conversation with God but don’t carve out time to pray, we’ll be sacrificing an important supernatural dialogue. If our relationship with the Lord is the “some day” kind, by the end of our lives we will have forfeited something precious and life-shaping.

Once in a while the relentless nature of daily tasks seems overwhelming, because they never end. I’m sure when Louisa packs her hair-cutting equipment at the end of a busy work week, there are times when she thinks, “I just can’t get away from it.”

But interestingly, God rewards our patient persistence to do the right thing. He likes that character quality, and when we work at it, he lets us get better and better at whatever we’re trying to do, especially if it’s in the spiritual realm. And best of all, he lets us know that we’re pleasing him.

When Louisa willingly gives one haircut after another, approaching each new cut with eager interest, the people she works on are drawn into her good cheer. And I believe God is nodding his approval, too.

“Patient persistence pierces through indifference.” (Proverbs 25:15a)