Persistence. It's a word that applies in many contexts. Climbing mountains. Running races. Getting an education. Mastering anything that's important and challenging.
As a Christian Science healer, I value persistence in prayer, and also the healing that comes from persistence. Jesus commended persistence in a parable he told his disciples when he was speaking to them about prayer. It's about a man who goes to friend's home at midnight and asks for three loaves of bread because an unexpected visitor has come. Jesus said that the neighbor might not get up just because his friend needed help, but he would surely get up and give the bread because of the friend's persistent knocking. See Luke 11:5–8 .
It's a helpful message for anyone who has been praying for a solution to a problem and hasn't found an answer. And it helped me. I'd had chest and back pain for a long time. I'd been praying about it, but I hadn't had much relief or improvement. Finally a day came along when I said to myself that although I had been persisting in my prayers, I needed to make a deeper commitment to healing. This meant slowing down my schedule and dropping out of some college classes.
