Ecclesiastes 7:8

The End That Counts

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof. Ecclesiastes 7:8.

I once lived in the same house with a little girl who was very clever with her hands. She could sew, she could knit, she could crochet, and she was always busy with some piece of work. She seemed to be tremendously keen on what she was doing, but I noticed that her piece of work was never very long the same. She seemed to be constantly starting something new, and what happened to the old piece I could not tell.

One day I found the little maid in tears. Between her sobs she told me the whole sad story. A new governess had arrived, and she had discovered in a drawer a dozen half-finished pieces of embroidery, half a dozen small scraps of crochet, and three or four knitted articles that boasted a first half, but badly wanted a second. She had found them all this clever governess and she had then and there decreed that not another piece of work should that little damsel begin till she had finished every one of those she had cast aside. It took her months and months and months, and it cost her many a sigh and many a tear ere she reached the end of that drawer full of work. But wasn't she proud the day the last stitch went into the last article? You should have seen how she beamed! And she had learned her lesson in the meantime. And she hasn't forgotten it since.

1. Now our text teaches us the very same lesson. It tells us that the end is better than the beginning. Everything has two ends a beginning end, and an ending end and it is the ending end that counts. There are heaps of young people in the world who are magnificent starters. They set out on any new undertaking with a tremendous flourish of trumpets. You feel that what they are going to do should be a success, for they seem to be putting their whole heart into it. But alas! they are only starters. Their fatal fault is that they can't keep at it, so they never get any further. Their enthusiasm burns so hot at first that it quickly burns itself out. We have a proverb, “Well begun is half done,” and a good beginning is not to be despised, but twenty yards ahead at the start of a race is not so important as twenty yards ahead at the goal. It's the keeping going that matters, and the people who have done the greatest things in the world have been, as a rule, not those who were cleverest at school and carried off all the prizes, but the people who were considered quite ordinary in class, but who made up their minds to “get there.”

We should all be better of a little of the bulldog nose. The bulldog nose is not what you could call a pretty shape, but it is splendidly useful, for the flat wrinkly way it slants back enables the bulldog to breathe and to hold on to his enemy at the same time. It is because he is able to hold on that he wins the fight. And victory in life is always to the boy or girl who holds on. We speak of holding on to the hitter end. That is a mistake. We should speak of holding on to the sweet end; for the joy and glow of a task well done is ten times sweeter than the joy of a task well begun.

2. But I should like to tell you something most important don't long too much for the end. If you are always counting how many rows of knitting there are before the garment can be finished, or how many pages there are before the end of the lesson book can be reached, if you are always sighing for the end, it won't help you to get there. The more you count and the more you sigh, the longer you will be on the way.

You will be like a clock I heard of the other day. It began to count how many seconds it would have to tick before the end of the year. It got so worried when it thought of the enormous number of times its pendulum would have to swing backwards and forwards that it determined to save itself further trouble by stopping altogether. Some of us are like that foolish clock. We think only how difficult it is to reach the end, and we forget how easy it is to take one tick at a time. Why, if we went on steadily tick by tick we'd be at the end almost before we knew! Don't think of everything at once. Think of the little bit in front of you, and determine to do that well. Climb your ladder step by step, instead of looking up at the top step and saying to yourself, “How am I ever to get up there?”

3. The last thing I should like to say is this there is no such thing as an end. Every end is just a new beginning. If you have won success, and have got the prize you worked for, don't sit down and do nothing more. Make that success the starting-point for a greater success. Don't be content with an end. Turn it into a beginning.

That is the true secret of advancement. It is the secret of life itself. Life never ends. Christ told us that death is not an end, it is only a new beginning. It is a beginning of something more glorious than we can ever dream or imagine; for who knows what wonderful things we may not do when at last we go to be with Christ?