Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 344 · December 10
Weary in Well Doing
“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”
We manage this better than we admit for about the first four rounds. What wears us out is one person, and the same trouble, coming back.
Picture the eleventh visit. Same stairwell, same bag on the step, same conversation about how this time it is going to be different, and you have heard that sentence enough times now to know the shape of the week that follows it. Nobody in your house says you should stop. They just look at you when you pick up the keys.
Read what Paul has been listing before this line, because well doing is not left vague. Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness. Then, bear ye one another's burdens. Then, money for whoever teaches you. Restoring somebody who was overtaken is the work in view, and anybody who has done it knows it has to be done again, because the fault is not usually overtaken once.
The encouragement he gives is a farmer's, and it is thinner than we want. In due season is a harvest phrase, a fixed point in a calendar nobody consults you about. Fainting is a collapse word, what happens to a body that has run out. And the sentence in front of it forbids the arithmetic we do in the meantime: Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Sowing does not look like anything for weeks. That is not a defect in the sowing.
Make the eleventh visit this week on the same terms as the first ten, and hand the calculation over while you are at it. You are not owed a result by Friday, and the field is not yours.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 344 is Shadow of Death into Morning (Amos 5:8).