Anybody who has ever put seed in the ground has stood at the end of a row and thought about digging one up.
You will not do it, because you know better. But the thought is there, and it comes at about the same point every year, which is a week or so after you expected to see something. The row is bare. The row next to it, which you planted the same afternoon, has come up. And there is a very specific feeling in a person standing over a bare row, and it is not patience.
The thought is always the same: something has gone wrong down there.
Now, a person who digs it up to check has ended the matter. Whatever was happening in the dark stops, and the answer they get, which is usually that the seed was doing exactly what seed does, arrives too late to be any use to that seed.
Here is a woman standing at the end of a different kind of row.
She turned eleven months ago and she meant it, and she has kept on since in a plain way: the habits, the honesty, the small daily going back. And nothing has come up. Not one visible thing. Her circumstances are the same. Her feelings about it are the same. The person she was hoping would notice a difference has not noticed a difference.
So she is standing at the end of eleven months looking at bare dirt, and the thought has arrived. Something has gone wrong down there.
I want to be careful, because this is not the same as being told to be patient by somebody with a full row. Eleven months of nothing is a real thing and it costs a person something to keep going, and anybody who talks about this cheaply has not done it.
That is you at the end of the row.
You've done what you were meant to do and there is no green showing. And you are working out whether to conclude that it did not take, because eleven months of nothing feels like data and standing here feels like foolishness.
Paul says due season, and he does not say when
Here is the line, and I want you to read it as a farmer rather than as a theologian, because Paul wrote it for people who knew about seed.
And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.Galatians 6:9
In due season. That is the phrase, and notice what it does not contain. It contains no date. It does not say next spring, or within the year, or after a period proportionate to your effort. It says due season, which means the season proper to that seed, and different seeds have wildly different ones, and nobody standing over a row gets to set it.
You are inside a season whose timing was never handed to you, and the absence of green is not a report on the seed, and I am not being easy on you: Galatians 6:9 says due season in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can settle it in a woman standing over bare dirt.
Now the first half of the sentence, because Paul puts it first for a reason. Let us not be weary in well doing. He is not warning them off doing wrong. He is warning them about a particular kind of tiredness that comes from doing right for a long time with nothing to show, and that is such a specific thing to warn about that it tells you he had watched it happen.
He is not surprised by your eleven months. He wrote a sentence for it.
You have been doing exactly what the verse describes, and the tiredness in you is the one Paul named rather than a sign that anything failed, which is written into the first clause rather than into my sympathy for a long year, with the Spirit of God able to hold a person up through a stretch that argument cannot shorten.
And there is one more thing about seed that I have never seen anybody preach and it is the plainest fact in gardening. What happens first, under the ground, is the root. Every bit of the early work goes downward, and it goes downward for exactly as long as it needs to, and a plant that comes up before its root is in is the one that dies in the first hard week.
So a bare row at eleven months is not the absence of work. It is the presence of the kind of work you cannot see and would not want skipped.
This has been going down rather than up, and downward is the direction the first part of any real growing takes, because Scripture puts the reaping in a season God times, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that out to a garden in the late afternoon.
Do not dig it up.
Eleven months of bare row is not evidence that the seed failed. It is what a row looks like while the root goes down, and every real thing that has ever grown has spent longer in that condition than the person standing over it wanted.
Paul does not give you a date and he does not pretend the waiting is easy. He names the exact tiredness you are feeling, tells you not to let it finish you, and then puts the timing somewhere you cannot reach it, which is the only place it could ever have been safe.
You are inside a due season rather than a failed one, and the reaping is promised on His clock and not yours, because Galatians 6:9 says due season and gives no date, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a thing you can stand on rather than a phrase you have heard before.
Leave the row alone. Go and do the next ordinary thing.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud, in whatever voice this afternoon has left you, and a plain one is right. The standing to say them is not something a person works up to and it does not come off her record: Christ is in you, and the authority in these words belongs to Him and has been given to you in Scripture, made living by the Holy Spirit rather than by what is showing above the ground. Jesus put the faith required at a mustard seed, which is His way of setting it under the line where anybody would trouble to measure, and then He said the part that carries: speak to the mountain. The mountain here is not the eleven months. It is the timetable you keep checking against. Speak to that. What He does with the rest of it He does in His own way, and the step is yours to take this afternoon.
- Timetable I keep checking against, you are not mine to set, and in the name of Jesus I hand you over. Scripture says in due season, which names a season and gives no date, and no one standing over a row has ever been handed the calendar.
- Fear that eleven months of nothing is a verdict on the seed, you have had me at the end of this row all summer. Scripture warns about weariness in well doing, so the tiredness in me is the one Paul saw coming and never the proof you keep offering.
- Lord God, You put the reaping in a season You keep and You have been working downward the whole time I was watching the surface, and I am standing one step further on than I was a minute ago. I thank You, because Your Holy Spirit did the holding and Your word left the timing with You, and I am received mid season and not at the end of a harvest I cannot see yet.
Galatians 6:9
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