There's a scene in the film, Apollo 13, where the astronauts have overcome most of the obstacles they've encountered and have one last hurdle in order to arrive home safely: reentry into the earth's atmosphere.
If they enter the atmosphere at too steep an angle, they will burn up. If they enter the atmosphere at an angle that is too shallow, they will skip off and be lost in space forever. They must enter the atmosphere at an extremely precise angle.
As the three astronauts prepare for the final engine burn which will either set them on the path towards home or towards death, they have no computer to automatically guide them. They must manually set their course toward the narrow gate that will lead to their safe return. To do this they set their sights on the line across the earth where night ends and day begins. If they are not aimed at this point when they fire their engines, they will have lost all hope of making it back home.
The astronauts start the engines and are immediately off on a wild ride. The spacecraft wobbles in every direction and as they try to correct and steer towards their goal, they sometimes overshoot and point the ship in yet another wrong direction. Sometimes they get the direction right but then are once again over-steering and heading off course.
Just as the engines are about to shut down, they get themselves perfectly lined up with the earth. All the back and forth they experienced, sometimes on target, sometimes off, doesn't matter as much as the fact that, when the ride was over, they were aimed in the right direction. Their striving is over, their safe arrival home assured.
Of course, all that the astronauts did before the last few minutes is important. But all of that would have been for naught if they had not ended well.
Strive to enter through the narrow gate and be sure to run the race to its completion (see Matt. 7:13-14 and 1 Cor. 9:24-27).
Amen
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