The gift was painful. I was spending a teenage summer at Bagabag, Wycliffe's center in the northern Philippines, which provided critical flight support to remote translators. (Note: their Helio Courier aircraft were a byproduct of WWII that would throttle back to 30 mph for jungle airstrips - so in a stiff headwind they could appear to hover in place, or even fly backwards.) 

Living with a missionary family, my job was to organize the parts stockroom in the hangar (and to dispose of the scorpion lurking behind one of the jars). In my free time, I came into possession of some sort of model plane, and was spending another "extended" lunch break playing with it on the apron in front of the hangar, when Uncle Eric came over and quietly offered, "You know, we'd get more done around here if you'd work a little harder."

As I've dealt with that admonition over the years, I've discovered a new danger -- diligently tweaking, instead of finishing (currently, I'm making tiny, but important revisions to our audio player designs; perhaps 1600 tries is the right approach, but only if your name is Edison and you are called to invent the lightbulb). I've treated this persistent malady with lists, flow charts, and helpful slogans like "Perfect is the enemy of good" and "Failure counts as done. So do mistakes. Destruction is a variant of done" and "Done is the engine of more."

But all the world's counsel breaks down and is helpless in the choosing, timing, and motivation of our doing. Our all-knowing, all-finishing God explicitly says He has plans (Jer. 29:11) and prepared works (Eph. 2:10) for us -- which should immediately force our own leanings and proclivities to the back of the line.

George Mueller, whose life exhibited astounding spiritual productivity in three expansive arenas of orphan care, missionary support, and evangelistic outreach -- all from the overarching desire to teach his generation that God can be fully trusted -- lived by three questions: "Is it God's will?" "Is it God's will for me?" "Is it God's will for me now?"

Elisabeth Elliot pulls a similar essence from an old poem:

And finally, Paul frames the proper single-minded motivation: "One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." (I wonder if he thought his great work would be the specific churches, mostly gone now, while God's favor has rested on their global offspring and, oh, his letters!)