Years ago I went with a friend while he was buying a car. We walked on to the dealer’s lot and he found a little Ford Escort station wagon that he liked. It was a demo car with 3,000 miles on it. The salesman took us into the “closing room” and told us the car would cost $9,100. My friend Jim, who was a commercial real estate loan officer and a professional negotiator, took his checkbook out of his pocket said, “I will write you a check right now for $7,600 cash and we will take the car home tonight.” (These are actual numbers—I remember them because Jim was buying the car as a gift for me!) The salesman, a young man in his second week on the job, smiled and said, “I’ll go ask my manager but you will never get that car for $7,600.” The young man came back and said the manager was willing to come down to $8,700 but no more. My friend is a very tenacious man, very tenacious. To make the story short enough for this article I will just tell you that their back and forth negotiation went on for more than two hours and in the end my friend wrote a check for $7,600 and we took the car home that night.

 

Jim is one of the most tenacious people I have ever met. He is like a “bulldog on the mail man’s pant leg.” This is an ancient metaphor (maybe cliché and will you please forgive me for this) but I love the metaphor—it is so clear and powerful and graphic. I hope you can visualize a bulldog with his teeth clamped clear through the mail man’s pant leg and just refusing to let go even as the mail man kicks furiously and shouts angrily at the little critter and hops down the sidewalk.

 

In profound ways, if we are to be people of sterling self-control, we must be people of remarkable tenacity—holding on to a dream and vision like a stubborn bulldog. We must set our hearts and minds on really godly things and just refuse to be deterred from them. We must see the vision of what could be and dedicate ourselves to that vision in ways that rival my friend Jim the professional negotiator. 

 

In a world like ours obstacles will always come between us and the dreams and visions of God’s better future. They will always come. No exceptions. So if our commitment to that better future is half-hearted or even three-quarter hearted we will never get there. It is tenacious people who climb over the barriers or burrow under them and get to the place where they see God wants them to be and their families to be and their church to be. Everything of great value is costly.

 

In 1975 Kathi and I decided that my getting a master’s degree in theology was the “God-honoring better future” for us and for the opportunity for high-leverage ministry. Both of us had to be bulldogs for more than 6 years to get there. I could write a book about the obstacles to that goal and about the ways that God interceded and about the ways that we had to be tenacious. Without tenacity in both of our hearts and wills I would be working in forestry somewhere in northern Idaho—which is a great vocation (from the Latin word vocâre which means “calling”) but not the vocation for which God ultimately wired me.

 

Major Caution: Beware that you are being tenacious about God-honoring and people-blessing things! If you are being tenacious about self-absorbed things the outcome will be sadness and harm all around. The best practice is always to ask three trusted friends to give you their candid opinion about the things about which you are being tenacious. Many times others see our goals more clearly than we see them.

 

You may have visions of “God’s better future” in your heart that you have not pursued or have pursued and then abandoned when obstacles arose. You may have just given up which amounts to refusing to be tenacious.

 

I am quite convinced that tenacity is a personal choice rather than a gift that some people have and some people do not. I am sure that some people have more of a “bulldog wiring” than others but still tenacity must certainly be a matter of personal choice.