Long Patience

Nobody talks about the middle of June.

Everybody has something to say about planting. There is a whole vocabulary for it and people get sentimental about seed. And everybody loves the harvest, which is photographed and fed to visitors and talked about all winter.

Nothing gets said about the middle of June.

In June you have done everything you can do. The seed is in, and it has been in long enough that the excitement of putting it in has gone, and the crop is up but not doing anything you can see from one day to the next. You walk out and it looks exactly as it looked yesterday. There is nothing to do to it that would help, and there is a great deal you could do to it that would not.

A farmer in June is a person with no available action, watching something that is not visibly changing, for weeks.

That is where you are this morning.

You did the thing. It was real. And now there is a stretch in front of you where there is nothing further to do and nothing yet to see, and you have begun to read the length of the stretch as a message about the sowing.

That is the mistake and it is a natural one. When a person has no action available, the mind will find something to do, and what it usually does is start interpreting the delay.

That is you at the kitchen door.

You've done the doing. And there is nothing to see, and nothing further to do, and you have started to treat the emptiness of the middle as information about whether any of it took.

James names the posture and calls it long patience

James is writing to people who want something to happen, and he reaches for a farmer, and the phrase he uses is one of the most useful in the whole letter.

Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.James 5:7

Hath long patience for it.

Not patience. Long patience. James puts an adjective on it because he is not describing a mood you summon on a difficult afternoon. He is describing a posture held over a season, and he attaches it to the one person in any village who has the most experience of gaps.

You are in the stretch James actually names, and long patience is the posture rather than a sign that something is wrong, and I am not softening a verse: James 5:7 says long patience for it, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can settle a person standing at a door in June.

Now look at the other thing he says about the husbandman. Waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth. Waiteth is his whole activity in that sentence. Not works, not checks, not intervenes. In the season James is describing, the farmer's entire job is to wait, and no village anywhere has ever thought less of a man for it.

You have no available action and that is not idleness, it is the season, which is written into the verb rather than into my sympathy for a long stretch, with the Spirit of God able to hold somebody through weeks that argument cannot shorten.

And then the last clause, which is quiet and important. Until he receive the early and latter rain. Two rains, months apart, neither of them in his gift. The farmer's patience is long because the thing he is waiting on comes in more than one installment, and both installments belong to God, and the length of the gap between them is not something anybody in that village voted on.

I have known women who could not sit down in June. It was not laziness in reverse and it was not anxiety exactly. It was that having no available action felt like negligence to them, and they would go out and do things to a crop that did not need doing.

This is the waiting part and it has a name in Scripture, because James calls it long patience and puts it in the mouth of a farmer, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a kitchen doorway in the early morning.