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.”
Most of us can keep helping someone for the first few rounds, better than we admit. What wears us out is the same person coming back with the same trouble, again and again.
Picture the eleventh visit. It is the same stairwell, the same bag left on the step, and the same talk about how this time things are going to be different. You have heard that promise often enough to know how the week after it usually goes. Nobody at home tells you to stop. They just look at you when you pick up the car keys.
Read what Paul lists just before today's verse, because he does not leave "well doing" vague. "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness." Then he says, "Bear ye one another's burdens," and then he tells them to share good things with whoever teaches them God's word. The well doing in view is restoring someone who has been caught in a fault. Anyone who has done that work knows it usually has to be done more than once, because a fault seldom catches a person only one time.
The encouragement Paul gives is a farmer's, and at first it may seem thinner than we want: "for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not." "In due season" is a harvest phrase. It means at the proper time, on God's calendar, which nobody else gets to set. The Greek word behind "faint" means to give out, the way a body gives out when it has no strength left. Just before this, Paul gives the rule the promise rests on: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." He adds that "he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." A sown field shows nothing for weeks, and that does not mean the seed has failed.
So make the eleventh visit this week on the same terms as the first ten. While you are at it, hand the counting over to God. You are not owed a result by the end of the week, because the field belongs to Him. And He has promised that in its season there will be a harvest.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 344 is Shadow of Death into Morning (Amos 5:8).