day no. 15,606: character is hard, caricatures are soft

"What is the main test of human character? Probably it is this: that a man will know how to be patient in the midst of hard circumstance, and can continue to be personally effective while living through whatever discouragements beset him and his companions. Moreover, that is what every truly civilized man would want in himself during the calmer moments when he compares critically what he is inside with what he would like to be." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

Perseverance is the ability to remain under difficulty as long as it remains difficult. To persevere requires the person to engage rather than avoid difficulties. It requires the person to endure the additional difficulty of remaining in the difficulty and it requires the person to outlast the difficulty, proving himself too difficult for the difficulty to break. The persevering person is too tough for the difficulty to crack. The difficulties end up giving up. They cannot outlast the man who perseveres.

Character does not side step hard things. Character is further formed in enduring hard things. Character is formed in proving harder than the hard thing. Character is the hard thing bearing the marks of having been through some stuff.  

Christians are called to encounter difficulty and submit themselves to the process of character development. Christians are called to have character produced by hardness instead of being caricatures resulting from softness.

Matthew 7:13-14
Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

Perseverance is not merely identifying the narrow gate, but entering it. It is more difficult to squeeze your way through it, but the difficulties you encounter in making your way through its narrow opening give way to life whereas the softness of strolling through the wide way ends in erosion of the entire person with nothing left to show for it. 

Proverbs 24:10
If you faint in the day of adversity,
your strength is small.