Who wants to end at a deadline? I want to Finish!

Most everyday I chastise myself for not finishing. In fact, I say that it is God’s great joke that I have a business called Fit2Finish and I never finish anything. What is it about “finishing” that impedes my progress?

People tell me to “set deadlines.” And when I do, I get stuff done, almost always by the deadline. I feel compelled to do so. I hold fast to the endpoint and I scurry to put as much together as I can, knowing that once I turn it in I can check the box and be done with it. Someone else can take it from there. I can move on to the next thing.

But for some reason finishing is different. Finishing looks larger. It is completing with optimum quality. There is an accountability and a finality to finishing. When I get to the point where there is no revision needed, it is finished. This is way more than a deadline.

“Just let me know when you’re finished,” is an open-ended proposition. How really do I know when I have finished? Couldn’t it always be better? Isn’t there always more to be done? Aren’t there improvements to be made? alternatives to test or try on and discard?

Perhaps this is why I have trouble finishing. Along the way, the middle of the project lengthens and the finish line doesn’t seem to get any closer. In fact the finish line seems to be moving away as fast as I approach it. It reminds me of the “world record line” gamely drawn across our screens as our Olympic swimmers chased after it this summer. It added tension as we watched our heroes drive toward the wall as fast as they could, while the little gray line laughed and pulled away.

Sometimes it felt like if only they saw that line taunting them they would swim a bit faster to achieve glory in the record books. But I know it isn’t so. If they looked up at the glory it would have ruined their streamline and slowed their finish. No, the only hope they had for glory was to put their heads down, drive for the wall, and swim as hard as their training had prepared them to swim. Toward the finish line. A wall they could see and could touch that would register their finishing time.

Who wants to end at a DEADline, right? I’m racing toward the Finish Line.

Of course, in soccer, the touch line is not just at the end of the field. It’s the line that runs the length of the field on both sides. It touches us, each time we take the field, and each time we come off. Maybe just playing hard finishes us.