Resist the Urge To Give Up

“Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” – Philippians 1:6 I love my Grandpa Schuller’s admonition to “never cut down a tree in the winter.” Though it meant little to me as a kid from Southern California, when I moved to Oklahoma as a teenager, I finally understood the imagery that inspired this phrase. Since we lived in Broken Arrow, there was a huge forest of trees behind our house. They were green and lush in the spring and summer, but in the winter, they would lose all of their leaves.  In that state, it was impossible to distinguish between the ones that were dead versus those that would ultimately thaw out and come back to life. Months later, when the warmth of spring had melted the snow and new growth had