At the Proper Time

"For in due season we will reap, if we do not give up." (Galatians 6:9)

There is a promise buried in that verse, and it comes with a condition, and the condition is not what you would expect. It is not if you do it well. It is not if you do it with joy, or without complaining, or with your heart in the right place the whole time. The condition is if you do not give up. That is the entire requirement. Do not quit.

You are allowed to be tired. You are allowed to be doing good with a heart that feels like a stone. You are allowed to have lost the fire and be running on nothing but habit and stubbornness and a promise you can barely remember believing. At the proper time you will reap. Not at your time, at the proper one, which is God's, and which is almost never the season we would have picked. That gap is exactly where most people put the shovel down, four inches from the water, certain nothing is there because nothing has come yet.

The harvest is not a reward for enthusiasm. It is a reward for still being there. So measure yourself, on the hard days, by the only measure the verse gives. Not by how you feel about the work, not by what you can see coming up out of the ground, but by whether you are still in the field. Stay in the field. The proper time is God's to name, and he has never once been late to a harvest he promised.