People ask me week after week how to help them feed their families. They have issues ranging from picky eaters to how to deal with varying health issues. Each week, I say nearly the same thing: it's positive persistence that wins the battle, whether you're dealing with pickiness or a health issue. Positive persistence will make all the difference.

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Your positive persistence will certainly go through a testing period, make no mistake about it. You will understand through your own personal experience what it means to endure tenaciously, especially because the "obstacle, opposition and discouragement" will probably be having a meltdown right before your very eyes.

Winston Churchill said, "Never, never, never, never, never give up." He made this comment during a time of war. I'm reiterating this statement in a time of war, too. Fighting to feed your child healthfully and nutritiously isn't easy, but it's worth the battle scars. If you positively persist, your children will learn a life skill on how to feed themselves in a way that will preserve their health and help them live to their most optimum levels. --Leanne Ely

I am on the FlyLady email list, and today I received this one labelled "Food for Thought: Positive Persistence." It really struck me, not only because I agree that it is worth the struggle to feed one's family healthy foods but also because Leanne is right that positive persistence makes all the difference in whatever challenges you face. The hardest thing you are struggling with right now can only be resolved through positive persistence. However, positive persistence does not mean struggling doggedly along with despair in every gesture. Rather, positive persistence is really hope in action; therefore, it is joyful! Our Holy Father wrote in his latest encyclical Spe Salvi:

Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet”. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.

To imbue our actions in the present with the security of our future reward--this is indeed hard, which is why persistence is required, positive persistence.